July 20, 2023 • 43 mins
In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous evangelist in America. This week on The Last Archive: The ballad of Big Jim and what the intersections of telephone history and American spirituality reveal about how we understand the phone.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin the Last Archive A History of Truth?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Are you going to answer that? I don't want to
tell you what to do, but you're listening to this
on your phone and your phone is ringing. Fine, I'll
answer it.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
It's a character from a movie made in the nineteen fifties, Wiretapper.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Could you develop equipment to listen in on a telephone?
That is, record a conversation without the owner knowing anything
about it?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Wiretapper tells the story of Big Jim Voss, an electronics
guy in Los Angeles who gets work bugging and slowly
but surely gets sucked into a criminal underworld and winds
up becoming a pretty big deal. There's this scene that
shows the moment he becomes a wire tapper. You can
tell he's hanging out with the mob because they're sitting
around smoking, listening to jazz.
Speaker 5 (01:25):
Wiretapping is illegal, mister Remstey, just that the question, I
could put the equipment together.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
The movie hit theaters early in nineteen fifty five. That
same year, a best selling book called Wiretap was in stores.
Columbia Pictures was said to be working on a movie
called The wire Tappers. The stuff was all over the place.
It was still a new thing for some people to
have a phone in their house, and people were a
little itchy about it. The newspapers kept writing stories about
the dangers of wire tapping. Someone was listening in wiretapper
(01:55):
of the movie was tapping straight into that fear. The
ads for the film read, if you're on the phone,
you're not safe.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Even the police aren't a lot of tap private wires.
Here's five hundred, there'll be another five. I have you
do a good job.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
I guess if it's for the police, eh, it'll be
all right.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So this movie at first seemed to me like pretty
straightforward in noir stuff. But it wasn't made by a
major studio like Warner Bruthers or MGM or Columbia. It
was made by the most famous evangelical Christian in the country,
the Minister Billy Graham, which maybe I should have suspected
from all the church scenes.
Speaker 6 (02:36):
The Bible says, what shall it properer man? He be
gained the whole world and lose his home soul.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So this put a pretty big question in my mind.
Why was the most famous evangelist in America making a
movie in the nineteen fifties about how if you're on
the phone, you're not safe. Pulling on this thread. It
turned out to be like yanking on a telephone gable
and discovering that it's wired up to everything in the
United States. Welcome to Season four of The Last Archive,
(03:09):
the show about how we know what we know, how
we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm
Ben Matta Haffrey. Today's episode, We're Tapping the Phones. I
was watching that movie Wiretapper, because I've gotten curious about
the history of a feeling. I think a lot of
people have. Now we're all on our phones all the time,
(03:31):
and I at least have pretty much accepted that I'm
constantly being surveiled, if not by wiretappers and cops, then
by companies and bots. But this weird intersection of phone
anxieties in American religion in the fifties caught me off guard.
I wanted to understand how those things fit together, So
I dug into the absolutely unhinged story behind that film,
(03:52):
a story about the telephone, American spirituality, and most of all,
that wiretapper, Big Jim Voss. Because it turns out He's
a real guy.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yarn and raised in the city of Los Angeles, the
son of a preacher.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Jim Voss, son of a preacher, grew up in Los Angeles.
His first phone number was Broadway sixteen zero seven. That
was more important than the son of a preacher thing,
because Big Jim wasn't on track to become a preacher
like his father. He was on track to become a
telephone criminal.
Speaker 7 (04:35):
His father was definitely, you know, on the fundamentalist side.
He had two sisters, but being the only boy, I
think there were a lot of expectations that he would
go into the ministry himself.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Will Voss one of Big Jim's kids, who wrote a
book about his father's life. Like his grandfather, Will is
a minister. I called him up to talk about his
dad and just to say if the interviews in this
episode sound different than usual, it's because I recorded them
by tapping my phone.
Speaker 7 (05:07):
You know, he really struggled with the level of expectation
that was there, and in his younger life really rebelled
against just the whole upbringing.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
This is a kind way of saying that from childhood on,
Big Jim Voss was always in.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Trouble thata guy would sell them out of it.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Voss grew up during the Great Depression, but he decided
the reason his family was poor was because his parents
were Christians. He wanted to get rich. When he was little,
his parents took in borders to earn a little bit
of extra cash, and there was one man who was
always building radios. Voss would sit in the border's room
and watch. Eventually, the man taught Kid Jim had to
(05:50):
tinker himself, and he fell in love with sound machines, radios,
microphones phones. Pretty quickly. He realized that one of the
best parts about this gear was that he'll let you
hear things you weren't supposed to.
Speaker 7 (06:04):
His first wired top experience is that he wired his
sister's date in the family home.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
He was about twelve. His sister's boyfriend was coming over.
Kid Jim dug around his electronics stash, snuck into the
living room and hit a microphone behind the couch. He
ran a wire from it out a window to a
speaker in the backyard, and then.
Speaker 7 (06:28):
Sold tickets to kids in the neighborhood to come listen
to his sister's conversation with her boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
This is like his origin story that combination spying, recording devices,
money betrayal. That was the story of Big Jim Voss'
life in college at Bible School, he claimed he'd set
up a fundraiser for the yearbook where people paid to
watch a long distance call from Los Angeles to Africa. Then,
(06:57):
according to his son Will, he embezzled the money and
he flew to Florida. He got away with that, But
it was mugging an old man at gunpoint that supposedly
finally landed him in prison. He left his driver's license
at the scene. But Big is like a cat with
nine lives. World War II was for most people not
a good thing. For Jim Voss, it was great because,
(07:17):
he says, he left prison, got drafted, and was put
to work using his electronic skills.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
The army was good to me, wiped out the record
of conviction, detailed me to duty on the West Coast.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
This tape, by the way, is from a speech Foss
gave a couple of years before that Wire Tapper movie
came out. This is his version of his life story.
The story that movie is based on, the story whose
significance I'm trying to understand a lot of It is
probably fluff, but there's important truths there if you sift
for them. First truth, this is a story about how
(07:49):
Big Jim Voss was bad news.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Finally was court marshaled again, this time for misuse of priorities,
misappropriation of government's property. I was sent in ten years hard.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Labor misappropriation of government property, basically stealing equipment from the army,
as he tells it. When the war ended he got out.
He moved back home to Los Angeles in his parents'
house to set up an electronics business. Now we're going
to leave Big Jim there for a moment, just a moment,
so I can tell you that that decade, the nineteen forties,
(08:26):
Americans were spending a lot of time on the phone.
The telephone had been around since eighteen seventy six, so
to me, the phone seems practically ancient compared to say,
the radio. But it was especially after the Second World
War that the telephone system really exploded for the first time.
More than half of Americans had phones in their homes.
(08:47):
You can hear the thrill of it in those post
war telephone ad campaigns.
Speaker 5 (08:51):
Lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your
fingertaips speed and your voice spans oceans and continents with
the speed of light.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Everyone was getting a phone. There were ten thousand new
hookups a day. More people got telephones right after the
war ended than any other time in history up till them.
In the four years after the war, the system grew
by half, and in the sprawling, booming city of Los Angeles,
everyone was patching in. It had always been a big
phone city. As a historian Emily Bills points out, everyone
(09:23):
thinks cars la, but before there were cars, trolleys, or
even paved streets in downtown Los Angeles, there were telephone
lines criss crossing all over the place, and over time
it became a catch all technology. People used the phone
for everything, the means.
Speaker 8 (09:40):
Were transacting business, the means for communicating information, for seeking help,
for keeping all friends in touch.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
But people swiftly realized that the phone didn't just connect
you to everything, It connected everything to your living room.
That was a little anxiety inducing. Maybe all this connection
wasn't such a good thing after all. There was a
lot of concern about who might call, and the fact
that they might call at any hour. But even more
upsetting was the concern about who might be listening, which
(10:14):
was on a lot of people's minds because they were
all on something called a party line, which phone companies
spend a lot of time and money getting people used to.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
You and the other fellow on your line can help
each other to better telephone service by simply being good
party line neighbors.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Party lines were shared lines that connected a few houses
to the network. Most phone users had them, so picking
up the phone and overhearing someone else's conversation was a
regular thing. I find that tension really interesting. Here was
a device that lets you speak one on one to
someone far away from the privacy of your own home.
It invited secrets, but it also gave you the constant
(10:53):
awareness that someone might be able to hear them at
any time. I feel that now when I Google something
and then the next day see ads for it all
over the place. This moment the nineteen forties, when a
lot of people were getting their phones and Big Jim
was in La setting up his electronics business, I think
that feeling began to go mainstream by the way people
(11:14):
called him Big Jim Voss, because what else do you
call a guy who's six foot four weighs three hundred
and twenty four pounds and is pursuing his passion for
electronics in his parents' basement.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Believe me, that's lige. Don't look so startled you've been
wondering anyway.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Imagine a guy that size, with slicked hair and big
v neck lapels like a linebacker, who kind of looks
like Elvis if you squint. He stood a head taller
than pretty much anyone else. With his life of crime
behind him, Big Jim went straight with his electronics business
at his parents' house for like two seconds.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
One day, we were approached by the Los Angeles Police Department.
They wanted us to aid them in the development of
some equipment they thought would could have curbed crying.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
The LAPD had found Big Jim kind of by accident.
A cop on their vice squad, Officer Charles Stoker, was
investigating a tip about an alleged prostitute living in an
apartment building. The other tenants had been complaining. When Stoker arrived,
he checked in with the manager, who happened to be
Big Jim Voss, helping out a friend. Luckily for us,
(12:20):
Stoker was very much the hero of his own story
and later wrote about this fateful encounter in a memoir
called Thicker in Thieves, the nineteen fifty factual expose of
police payoffs, graft, political corruption, and prostitution in Los Angeles
and Hollywood. Stoker needed proof that the suspect was engaging
in prostitution, but it was going to be hard to
(12:40):
get the kind of evidence he needed, at least if
he was going to do it legally.
Speaker 9 (12:46):
One glance at the apartment, and I knew that the
arrest was going to be difficult, since defendans must be
caught in the act of sexual intercourse. The apartment had
a long hallway and the rooms were so far from
the outer door it would be virtually impossible to detect
incriminating conversation.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Big Jim was there observing all of this. Truthfully, he
didn't really care if one of the tenants was in
aging and prostitution. He later wrote, I was keeper of
no man's morals. But having watched the cops haplessly climb
a tree in an attempt to catch the woman in
the act, Big Jim sensed an opportunity. He revealed to
officer Stoker that his real job was electronics microphones. He
(13:28):
told them that he could bug the room and get
them the proof they needed. The cops were thrilled. This
plan wasn't exactly legal, but it probably seemed better than
the climbing trees thing. So Big Jim Voss got to work.
He hit a microphone in the room, and then they listened.
Speaker 9 (13:45):
To say that I was amazed what I heard would
be an understate.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Big Jim had struck gold. The vice squad cops loved him.
He began making them all kinds of wire tapping gizmos.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
We had one gadget that made it possible for us
who listen into telephone conversation, so that we didn't have
to go anywhere near the telephone in question, but we
could sit back on the other side of town and
hear all what was being said on that telephone.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Big Jim was kind of like Queue in James Bond.
He kept coming up with new ways for the cops
to spy on people. Mostly his innovations came from hiding
miniaturized microphones in places and recording what he heard on
a wire, an old recording format. He was especially proud
of something he called a talking cane, which allowed cops
to hear things through walls. It looked like a walking stick,
(14:45):
except it probably had a tiny microphone hidden in the
end and a wire running up the cane through the
cops sleeves to an amplifier and then to an earbud.
It also sent a signal wirelessly to a recording device
hidden in a car outside, so they could tape everything.
And then there were the wire taps that became Big
Jim's signature.
Speaker 10 (15:04):
Tectologically speaking, in the days of the Copper eelephone system,
the electro mechanical switching system, it was really quite easy
to tap a line.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
That's Brian Hawkman, director of American Studies at Georgetown University,
an author of the book The Listeners, a History of
wiretapping in the United States, And.
Speaker 10 (15:27):
It's Big Jim Voss who was a true pioneer in
the postwar electronic eavesdropping field and made an extraordinary name
for himself on both sides.
Speaker 7 (15:42):
Of the law.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Big Jim didn't make much money off the LAPD, but
as his reputation grew, he started getting more work around town.
He claimed to do a lot of work for movie stars. Specifically,
he said he'd tapped Mickey Rooney's phone so he could
prove his wife was having an affair.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
It's always interesting what goes on when people don't know
they're being listened to by so many people.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
I think this line of business is basically the same
as broadcasting his sister's date to the neighborhood kids, exposing
women by means of technology. The history of the telephone
and wiretapping is a history of privacy and concerns about
privacy which have always been gendered. We made a whole
episode about this a couple of years ago, The Invisible Lady.
You can listen to it on your phone on Apple
(16:29):
Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Anyway, the idea of
an electronic ear sitting in your living room was worrisome
to the broader public, in part because it violated the
sanctity of the home, and also because nobody particularly seemed
interested in cracking down on it. Exhibit A. The cops
were hiring Big Jim to do more of it.
Speaker 10 (16:50):
One thing that's extraordinary to note, Despite the fact that
wire tapping was illegal in the state of California, private
eavesdroppers for hire advertised their services openly in the LA
Yellow Pages. And this was a business that was out
in the olden It was illegal, but it was never prosecuted,
(17:15):
and Boss emerges as a leader in this very strange
gray area industry.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Big Jim Voss, son of a preacher, two time convict
cat on his third life, was now simultaneously working for
a bunch of movie stars who wanted to expose There
soon to be ex spouses, rich men who wanted radar
guard at homes, and self righteous cops who wanted to
wire tap call girls phones.
Speaker 7 (17:41):
I don't think at the time he thought much at
all about the morality of the things he was doing.
I think he thought it was great fun.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
It probably was fun until Big Jim got in over
his head. We'll be right back. In nineteen forty eight,
Big Jim Voss was wire tapping all over Los Angeles.
(18:13):
He was basically a character in a film noir movie.
Already that same year, an actual film noir movie came
out that opened with an epigraph which reads to me
like a mission statement for Big Jim.
Speaker 11 (18:25):
And the tangled networks of a great city. The telephone
is the unseen link between a million lives. It is
a servant of our common needs, the confidant of our
inmost secrets.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Big Jim Voss was wired tapping all over those networks,
and he was about to get tangled up in something
pretty serious. Among the many clients he claimed cops, movie stars, businesses.
Big Jim had been working with a private detective who
turned out to have a connection to the mob. The
Mob realized he could use a guy like Big Jim,
(19:00):
so they called him up.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
One day, we were called after a little habitashery on
the Sunset Drip in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Big Jim drove out to the Habitashery, a little hat
shop on the Sunset Strip, and he made his way
to the back.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I was quite well impressed, first of all with the
steel doors that I passed through to get into it.
Secondly with its exquisite furnishing, walnut panels that ran from
ceiling to floor, suspended television set in the corner, red
leathered upholstered furniture in a semi circular death behind which
SATIS famed man Mickey Cohen.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Mickey Cohen was the head of the Los Angeles Underworld. Short,
bald guy with a pretty odd personality, a cold blooded
killer who loved eating ice cream and washed his hands
fifty times a day. In the back of that hat shop,
he explained the situation to Big Jim. The LAPD had
bugged Cohen's house. Cohen wanted Big Jim to find the bug.
He came by the next day piece of cake. Cohen
(20:01):
was impressed, and pretty quickly he hired Big Jim to
listen in on all of his enemies for him, including
the LAPD, for whom Big Jim had also been wired tapping.
He was a double agent, worked for the good guys
and the bad guys, except as I came to realize,
those were the same guys. In Los Angeles, there used
to be something known as the combination, the alliance between
(20:22):
city government, law enforcement, and the mob. Something like that
still existed in Big Jim's day, so he didn't have
to pick sides because there weren't really sides. He worked
for the LAPD and he worked for the Mob. He
got pretty cozy with them. Eventually he moved his electronics
shop onto the Strip, right alongside the mobbed up Habitashery.
(20:43):
The strip was outside city jurisdiction for quite some time.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
After engaging in this activity with mister Cohen, I found
it convenience to work for him on the one side,
and for law enforcement agencies.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
On the other Voss was still working with the LAPD.
Tapping the phones was amazingly useful for those guys, because
the phone has always been a kind of refuge for
the things people can't do in public. That's one way
to think about the telephone network as a kind of
shadow of public life, the place where secret lives and
longings go, things like prostitution. In the late nineteen forties,
(21:20):
Voss's main gig with the police had been helping Stoker
investigate probably the biggest prostitution ring in the city. It
was headed up by a woman named Brenda Allen. She
was a hard nosed businesswoman, glamorous, always in sunglasses. As
Time magazine put it, somewhat absurdly, she had a mind
like a cash register, and she hadn't been in love
(21:40):
since she was twenty one. Like Big Jim, She'd found
a good use for Los Angeles' vast telephone network. Brothels
were risky, they could be raided, all the foot traffic
would draw attention. But if you had a web of employees,
each with their own phone, the modern adam could function
like a telephone exchange. This is where the term call
girl comes from. Brenda Allen had one hundred and fourteen
(22:02):
of them all over town. She was always on the
phone setting up secret rendezvous, and Officer Stoker wanted Big
Jim to listen in. He wrote about the plan in his.
Speaker 9 (22:13):
Memoir We went to Brendan entered through the basement through
a rear door, and in short order Voss had tapped
rendered Lyne. There were more calls than she could possibly
hand them. As soon as she received one call and
dispatched a girl or girls, she would dial the telephone,
exchange them and contact. The operator would give her the
(22:35):
names of waiting customs.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
The scene was recreated in that movie Wiretapper, in loving detail.
You can see the real equipment, and the conversation is
straight from an account. Big Jim wrote of the night.
Speaker 12 (22:49):
Cord, who gave you this number? Why, mister Fielding, our
sales manager. Oh, yes, Well, we have some very nice
books the heroine and one is especially attractive, A brunette
about five for three ads like very interesting reading. How
(23:12):
about ten o'clock at the corner of Sunset and Lbrea.
There'll be a picture on the front cover, a girl
in a mink coat. That'll be fine. Goodbye.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Stoker in real life was thrilled. Now he wanted to
find out who the call girls were, so a day later,
Big Jim came by with a device that could record
all the numbers. Brenda Allen was dialing an impulse indicator,
jammed in that basement, probably sweating, breathing as quietly as possible.
(23:44):
Big Jim and Stoker gathered twenty nine numbers in one night,
most of them for girls working for Alan. It was
a huge coup. Stoker was greedy for more numbers, so
he came back the next night with Big Jim's device,
hooked it up to the wire, and began writing down
all the numbers. And then he saw a number that
(24:06):
he recognized, the number of the La Vice Squad his
own department.
Speaker 9 (24:14):
My ears twitching, my nostrils flared as I listened. When
someone answered Brenda's ring, she inquired if Sergeant Jackson.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Was in Moments later, according to Stoker's account, Stoker and
Big Jim were listening to one of the top aids
to the head of the vice squad as he talked
with the Cities number one madam about how much they
loved each other. The call also confirmed that the vice
squad was being paid off by Allan. The self righteous
stoker was aghast crooked cops in Los Angeles.
Speaker 9 (24:46):
At the time. I had high ideals concerning the Los
Angeles Police Department.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Big Jim suffered from no such idealism, and when he
teamed up with Mickey Cohen, he told the mob all
about the recordings. It was too good not to share
leverage on the cops. But when word got out about
Big Jim's recordings of Brenda Allen and the LAPD, the
situation spiraled why out of control. Here's how bad corruption
(25:14):
was in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties. There was
a grand jury that met every year to investigate corruption
in government. When they caught wind of Big Jim's blockbuster
Brenda Allen recordings, they launched an investigation. It exposed corruption
all over the place, mobbed up cops, Brenda Allen paying
people off. It was so bad that the chief of
(25:34):
the LAPD even stepped down. Everyone was turning on everyone else,
and somehow Big Jim Voss and his wiretap recordings were
right at the center of it all.
Speaker 7 (25:45):
The police was looking for these tapes that my father
had related to Brenda Allen. Then he wasn't giving them up.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Will Voss, Big Jim's son, the pastor.
Speaker 7 (25:55):
Again he was leading them on a wild goose chase.
You're sure these tapes agrees, yes. And then in the
midst of all grand jury trial, you know he committed
perjury implicating a police officer that you know that Cohen
wanted to go down the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
It was the fall of nineteen forty nine and Big
Jim was in a tight spot. Everything was splintering. He
couldn't wire tap and bug for everyone anymore. The LAPD
and Cohen weren't on good terms. There was a gang war,
and Big Jim was involved in this whole other scheme
that was jeopardizing his relationship with Cohen. Big Jim had
been one step ahead of everyone the whole time, but
(26:44):
now it was all catching up to him. He had
nowhere to turn. In that exact moment, the modern evangelical
movement came crashing into Big Jim's life.
Speaker 8 (26:56):
From Minneapolis comes a young evangelist, Billy Graham, to cooperate
with Christ for Great Heir Los Angeles in a Great
Revival campaign.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
You probably know the name Billy Graham. He brought the
evangelical movement to political power in this country. His Los
Angeles crusade was what would make him famous nationwide. Graham
set up in a huge revival tent at the corner
of Washington and Hill Streets. It was big news.
Speaker 8 (27:25):
There are sixty five hundred people seated here in this
canvas cathedral, and several thousands more stand around the sides
of the tent, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand total
attendants in two months.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Big Jim's preacher father was worried about him started trying
to get him to check out Graham. In a town
that loved celebrities, suddenly a preacher was one of the
most famous guys around. Down on his luck, Big Jim
decided to go.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
I thought to myself, well, I'll just drive by and
see what's packed. I saw some fifteen thousand people trying
to jam their way in. I drove on by. Then
I thought, well, i'll park walk back.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Big Jim was at this point a recognizable face from
all the press coverage of the grand jury investigation. Someone
saw him. He was hard to miss and went to
tell Graham that a hardened criminal was in the audience.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
And I muscled my way to the front of the
standing crowd. Some old lady got up and left her seat,
and I grabbed it and I sat down and listened
to the program, not enjoying it one bit.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Big Jim was uncomfortable. And then Graham came on stage
and began to preach this it's the climactic moment of
the movie Wiretapper.
Speaker 6 (28:48):
As I've stood here this evening, I felt all evening
that there's a man somewhere in this audience. He's heard
this message many times before, and the Spirit of God
is striving mightily with him at this moment, and if
he doesn't come to Christ now, he may never come.
We're going to wait a moment. There's still time for
you to come and give your life to Christ.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Big Jim said he felt like Graham was speaking straight
to him. He stood up, he walked to the front
of the Canvas Cathedral. He fell to his knees, and
he gave himself to God. That speech you've been hearing, we.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Had one gadget that made it possible for us to
listen in the telephone conversation.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
It's a sermon. Big Jim Voss cat on his fourth life.
After that night, he quit the mob joined up with
Billy Graham and helped to make him one of the
most famous religious figures of all time by preaching about
the telephone. We'll be right back. Some people were a
(30:04):
little suspicious of Big Jim Voss's conveniently timed conversion. Among
them Officer Charles Stoker.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
Voss got himself a new code of celestial varnish. He
said that he was tired of being a sinner and
wanted to return to God.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Now Stoker might have been a little too hard bitten there.
Voss did ultimately set up a much acclaimed ministry called
Youth Development Incorporated, tending the gangs in Harlem. But look,
this episode is not about the ultimate state of Big
Jim Voss's soul. It's about the telephone. Remember, and Big
Jim was literally standing at the source of the twentieth
century evangelical movement in America with his ear to the
(30:43):
country's phones. Brian Hawkman, wiretapping historian on the line once again.
Speaker 10 (30:50):
And Graham used Vassa's conversion as one of his great
kind of advertisements for his teachings.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Big Jim started spreading the Gospel of the reformed Wiretapper.
He even published a book with the help of Graham's network.
It's called Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, and it was
a hit. Then Graham's ministry made that movie in nineteen
fifty five, another success, albeit a really weird one. And
then Voss started touring the country trying to save souls,
(31:23):
and what he talked about all the time was his
career wire tapping. He even brought wiretapping gear on stage
with him.
Speaker 10 (31:30):
He was God's wiretap. Where God had been calling, he
had never picked up the phone, and finally he tapped
in at just the right moment.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
This was the early nineteen fifties. There was talk of
a bugging epidemic in America, but also a sense of
just how miraculous this technology was. Bill Labs, the famed
research arm of the telephone company AT and T, had
just invented the transistor, the electrical device that made possible
the miniaturization of everything, including the phone in your pocket.
Speaker 10 (32:01):
So the story that Boss tells his congregation, illustrated through
the eavesdropping devices, is that no man can hide from God.
If man can't hide from man, if all conversations can
be recorded, everything hidden can be known, how can man
(32:24):
hope to hide from God?
Speaker 7 (32:26):
Here?
Speaker 10 (32:27):
Were man made miracles, evidence of the almost divine power
of technology to change the world.
Speaker 13 (32:36):
And there's also, I guess, the sort of the way
in which your secret in our life is a saying
no normly to God that is now possibly also known
to man, and this is through things like the wire
tapping devices.
Speaker 10 (32:47):
Absolutely he titled his sermon no Place to Hide.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
This story has it all crime, corruption, electronics, evangelicals, but
I think the phone is the thing that brings it
all together. In Big Jim sermons and Billy Graham's wiretapper,
electronics are miracles to be wondered at. But they also
threatened to expose you to men like the old big Gym,
(33:13):
to take the secret things that once only God or
your priest and a confessional could have known, and broadcast
them to everyone. And it's kind of a classically American story.
No other country took to the phone as quickly or
as thoroughly as we did. People fretted about how the
suburban sprawl was telephone aided in a country this big,
(33:33):
the phone holds it all together. There's something really American
about that idea of this one vast, fragile system connecting
all these crazy disparate lives together, wiretappers to preachers, call
girls to cops. It's like democracy as a technology, but
again like a shadow democracy. The phone is what you
use for the things you don't want to be seen
(33:54):
in public, the place you lead your secret life, whatever
that consists of. It reminds me of those nine hundred
numbers that became a big deal in the nineteen eighties,
which were famously used for phone sex and also for spiritualists.
That's kind of always been the thing with the phone,
secret longings and spiritualism. A lot of people thought maybe
you could reach the spirit world through the telephone lines.
(34:17):
All this to say, the experience of hearing a voice
from miles away almost instantaneously, it collapsed time and space
in a completely unreal, visceral way. And because it lets
you share things privately without showing your face, it invited confessions.
It's always created this kind of otherworldly private feeling that
(34:37):
religion deals with. That's part of why I think Big
Jim's wiretapping was such a rich vehicle for any evangelical message.
But that message, as Graham used it, was a little
Old Testament. The phone's like a God who hears all
and spares no one. It's a connection to all the
sin coursing through the country. Like that poster for Wiretapper
(34:58):
of the movie said, if you're on the phone, you're
not safe. But there was another side to it. As
Big Jim was touring the country talking about the phone
and wiretapping and the state of his audience's soul, another
religious movement was beginning in Ocean Away that was also
all about the phone. So let's leave Big Jim Voss
(35:19):
for a minute and make a long distance call from
the northeast under the sea on the cable that stretches
from North America along the ocean floor and up the
craggy Rocks to England, down the winding streets of London
to a church Saint Stephen Wahlberg, a church that had
(35:42):
been bombed out during the Blitz. It's nineteen fifty three
and an Anglican vicar named Chad Vera is starting the
very first suicide hotline.
Speaker 14 (35:54):
Vera had for a long time been really aware of
suicide and suicidality and been very preoccupied by the pain
that suicidality and suicide brought into communities, alongside, of course
the loss of individuals.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Hannah's Even is a historian of science who wrote a
book called The Distance Cure, A History of Teletherapy. Most
people think suicide hotlines are a secular kind of therapy,
but they came from the Church at a post war
moment when the suicide rate was rising in the US
and the UK. Chad Vera that Anglican vicar was trying
to figure out how to address it, and so.
Speaker 14 (36:32):
Vera in the early nineteen fifties had become not only
really preoccupied with the fact that there was this increase
in suicidality in this society, but also that there weren't
social mechanisms for intervening and helping those in crisis, not
only because it's unspeakable and all of the things that
might trouble someone so greatly or unspeakable, but also because
(36:55):
it was a felony.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
To the cops. Suicide was a crime. To the church,
it was a sin. So who could hear suicidal people
talk about it? They were totally isolated.
Speaker 14 (37:07):
Well, he really understood was that in a urgencies, right,
we are conditioned to reach for the telephone then as
now it's a different form of telephone, no doubt, but
that that was already a kind of habitast of your
any given individual. Nine one one as a formulation didn't
exist for some time in the US. In the UK,
that history is a little bit different, right, They did
(37:29):
have a unified number already, So it makes sense in
terms of telephone history, right that British folks were already
conditioned to call nine nine nine. So instead of putting
fire and police, and also while not making it, a psychiatrist,
Vera knew that we needed some kind of his society
needed some kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Vera decided to make a kind of telephone church. No
physical congregation, just phones and Vera with a secretary, Vivian Prosser,
offering counseling to people contemplating suicide twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 7 (38:06):
Then Vera got to work.
Speaker 14 (38:08):
He writ he offered this kind of serracutic confessional remediated.
And it was so popular because immediately it became a
feel good story in the popular person.
Speaker 7 (38:18):
On the radio.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Vera was offering a kind of half psychoanalysis, half pastoral counseling.
But the key thing was the telephone, the privacy of
that conversation, the anonymity had offered, and the connection to
someone when you needed them most. It was a brilliant
idea and immediately it was extremely popular, and.
Speaker 14 (38:39):
So Vera and Prosser couldn't handle the urgency of the
calls on their own, and it couldn't be truly twenty
four hours a day. That was another problem. So in
order to meet the demand for help over the phone
in its earliest moment, Vera trained fifty volunteers.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
It kind of reminded me of Brenda Allen's call Girl Network,
the private thing that someone wouldn't seek out in public
but could ask for on the phone. It's like a
system of tunnels under polite society, connecting someone filled with
despair and bedroom to a kindly ear in a blitz
bam church in London.
Speaker 14 (39:14):
And I just love this. The term of art is befriending,
which is this kind of ancient Christian term remade as
this new person to person, that mediated form of care.
And this is a Samaritans, which is the world's oldest
and also most used suicide hotline, and it's still active today.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Various ideas spread all over the world. The hotline went
on to take a lot of different forms, but it
was right there in the nineteen fifties a big news
story right alongside Big Jim's conversion narrative, two stories about
invisible listeners, overhearing you at your lowest point, and understanding
who you really are. Since the nineteen fifties, there have
(40:12):
been hotlines and dial of something services for pretty much
everything you can imagine, from the serious like nine to
eight eight today's National Suicide Hotline in the US, or
hotlines Fraid's Information in the nineteen eighties, to the less
serious nine five one two, six ' two three zero
six two Santa's Hotline six ' four to one seven
(40:33):
nine three eight one two two dial a pone. Even
Big Jim Voss started one one eight hundred hit Home,
a hot line for runaway kids looking for shelter. Will Voss,
big Jim's son, remembers working for it when he was
in college.
Speaker 7 (40:49):
I did do a lot of listening to kids, and
you know, I didn't I didn't have to prompt them
very much, you know, to pour their hearts out. It
to stappen naturally.
Speaker 13 (41:01):
It would have happened in the same way if you'd
been face to face with them.
Speaker 7 (41:05):
Probably not. Yeah, I think the anonymity really helped.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
The anonymity helps the phones a tool of alienation, the
phones a vehicle for connection. It turns out both things
are true. And what's amazing to me about these big
stories that people were using to understand the phone in
the fifties wiretaps and hotlines, is they've got these shadows,
spiritual messages. I think the phone still has those vestiges
(41:31):
baked into it. It's like a tiny god in your pocket,
wire tapping everything you say, surveilling and sometimes saving. The
(41:53):
Last Archive is written and hosted by me Ben Natapaffrey.
It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
this episode by Arthur Gombert's sound design by Jake Gorsky
and Lucy solib Our. Executive producers are Sophie Crane and
Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin's executive editor.
(42:17):
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Jannette Junior in the Stargenette Foundation Special. Thanks to Gary Goff,
Emily Bills, Emily Bannis, and Lydia Jencott. Archival audio courtesy
of Buswell Library and Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton College, Illinois.
(42:38):
For a bibliography, further reading, and a transcript and teaching
guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot com.
The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering
bonus content and ad free listening across our network for
four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus
(42:58):
channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, and
please sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm
slash Newsletter. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ben Nanna Faffrey.
Pushkin the Last Archive A History of Truth?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Are you going to answer that? I don't want to
tell you what to do, but you're listening to this
on your phone and your phone is ringing. Fine, I'll
answer it.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
It's a character from a movie made in the nineteen fifties, Wiretapper.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Could you develop equipment to listen in on a telephone?
That is, record a conversation without the owner knowing anything
about it?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Wiretapper tells the story of Big Jim Voss, an electronics
guy in Los Angeles who gets work bugging and slowly
but surely gets sucked into a criminal underworld and winds
up becoming a pretty big deal. There's this scene that
shows the moment he becomes a wire tapper. You can
tell he's hanging out with the mob because they're sitting
around smoking, listening to jazz.
Speaker 5 (01:25):
Wiretapping is illegal, mister Remstey, just that the question, I
could put the equipment together.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
The movie hit theaters early in nineteen fifty five. That
same year, a best selling book called Wiretap was in stores.
Columbia Pictures was said to be working on a movie
called The wire Tappers. The stuff was all over the place.
It was still a new thing for some people to
have a phone in their house, and people were a
little itchy about it. The newspapers kept writing stories about
the dangers of wire tapping. Someone was listening in wiretapper
(01:55):
of the movie was tapping straight into that fear. The
ads for the film read, if you're on the phone,
you're not safe.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Even the police aren't a lot of tap private wires.
Here's five hundred, there'll be another five. I have you
do a good job.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
I guess if it's for the police, eh, it'll be
all right.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So this movie at first seemed to me like pretty
straightforward in noir stuff. But it wasn't made by a
major studio like Warner Bruthers or MGM or Columbia. It
was made by the most famous evangelical Christian in the country,
the Minister Billy Graham, which maybe I should have suspected
from all the church scenes.
Speaker 6 (02:36):
The Bible says, what shall it properer man? He be
gained the whole world and lose his home soul.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So this put a pretty big question in my mind.
Why was the most famous evangelist in America making a
movie in the nineteen fifties about how if you're on
the phone, you're not safe. Pulling on this thread. It
turned out to be like yanking on a telephone gable
and discovering that it's wired up to everything in the
United States. Welcome to Season four of The Last Archive,
(03:09):
the show about how we know what we know, how
we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm
Ben Matta Haffrey. Today's episode, We're Tapping the Phones. I
was watching that movie Wiretapper, because I've gotten curious about
the history of a feeling. I think a lot of
people have. Now we're all on our phones all the time,
(03:31):
and I at least have pretty much accepted that I'm
constantly being surveiled, if not by wiretappers and cops, then
by companies and bots. But this weird intersection of phone
anxieties in American religion in the fifties caught me off guard.
I wanted to understand how those things fit together, So
I dug into the absolutely unhinged story behind that film,
(03:52):
a story about the telephone, American spirituality, and most of all,
that wiretapper, Big Jim Voss. Because it turns out He's
a real guy.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yarn and raised in the city of Los Angeles, the
son of a preacher.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Jim Voss, son of a preacher, grew up in Los Angeles.
His first phone number was Broadway sixteen zero seven. That
was more important than the son of a preacher thing,
because Big Jim wasn't on track to become a preacher
like his father. He was on track to become a
telephone criminal.
Speaker 7 (04:35):
His father was definitely, you know, on the fundamentalist side.
He had two sisters, but being the only boy, I
think there were a lot of expectations that he would
go into the ministry himself.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Will Voss one of Big Jim's kids, who wrote a
book about his father's life. Like his grandfather, Will is
a minister. I called him up to talk about his
dad and just to say if the interviews in this
episode sound different than usual, it's because I recorded them
by tapping my phone.
Speaker 7 (05:07):
You know, he really struggled with the level of expectation
that was there, and in his younger life really rebelled
against just the whole upbringing.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
This is a kind way of saying that from childhood on,
Big Jim Voss was always in.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Trouble thata guy would sell them out of it.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Voss grew up during the Great Depression, but he decided
the reason his family was poor was because his parents
were Christians. He wanted to get rich. When he was little,
his parents took in borders to earn a little bit
of extra cash, and there was one man who was
always building radios. Voss would sit in the border's room
and watch. Eventually, the man taught Kid Jim had to
(05:50):
tinker himself, and he fell in love with sound machines, radios,
microphones phones. Pretty quickly. He realized that one of the
best parts about this gear was that he'll let you
hear things you weren't supposed to.
Speaker 7 (06:04):
His first wired top experience is that he wired his
sister's date in the family home.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
He was about twelve. His sister's boyfriend was coming over.
Kid Jim dug around his electronics stash, snuck into the
living room and hit a microphone behind the couch. He
ran a wire from it out a window to a
speaker in the backyard, and then.
Speaker 7 (06:28):
Sold tickets to kids in the neighborhood to come listen
to his sister's conversation with her boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
This is like his origin story that combination spying, recording devices,
money betrayal. That was the story of Big Jim Voss'
life in college at Bible School, he claimed he'd set
up a fundraiser for the yearbook where people paid to
watch a long distance call from Los Angeles to Africa. Then,
(06:57):
according to his son Will, he embezzled the money and
he flew to Florida. He got away with that, But
it was mugging an old man at gunpoint that supposedly
finally landed him in prison. He left his driver's license
at the scene. But Big is like a cat with
nine lives. World War II was for most people not
a good thing. For Jim Voss, it was great because,
(07:17):
he says, he left prison, got drafted, and was put
to work using his electronic skills.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
The army was good to me, wiped out the record
of conviction, detailed me to duty on the West Coast.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
This tape, by the way, is from a speech Foss
gave a couple of years before that Wire Tapper movie
came out. This is his version of his life story.
The story that movie is based on, the story whose
significance I'm trying to understand a lot of It is
probably fluff, but there's important truths there if you sift
for them. First truth, this is a story about how
(07:49):
Big Jim Voss was bad news.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Finally was court marshaled again, this time for misuse of priorities,
misappropriation of government's property. I was sent in ten years hard.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Labor misappropriation of government property, basically stealing equipment from the army,
as he tells it. When the war ended he got out.
He moved back home to Los Angeles in his parents'
house to set up an electronics business. Now we're going
to leave Big Jim there for a moment, just a moment,
so I can tell you that that decade, the nineteen forties,
(08:26):
Americans were spending a lot of time on the phone.
The telephone had been around since eighteen seventy six, so
to me, the phone seems practically ancient compared to say,
the radio. But it was especially after the Second World
War that the telephone system really exploded for the first time.
More than half of Americans had phones in their homes.
(08:47):
You can hear the thrill of it in those post
war telephone ad campaigns.
Speaker 5 (08:51):
Lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your
fingertaips speed and your voice spans oceans and continents with
the speed of light.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Everyone was getting a phone. There were ten thousand new
hookups a day. More people got telephones right after the
war ended than any other time in history up till them.
In the four years after the war, the system grew
by half, and in the sprawling, booming city of Los Angeles,
everyone was patching in. It had always been a big
phone city. As a historian Emily Bills points out, everyone
(09:23):
thinks cars la, but before there were cars, trolleys, or
even paved streets in downtown Los Angeles, there were telephone
lines criss crossing all over the place, and over time
it became a catch all technology. People used the phone
for everything, the means.
Speaker 8 (09:40):
Were transacting business, the means for communicating information, for seeking help,
for keeping all friends in touch.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
But people swiftly realized that the phone didn't just connect
you to everything, It connected everything to your living room.
That was a little anxiety inducing. Maybe all this connection
wasn't such a good thing after all. There was a
lot of concern about who might call, and the fact
that they might call at any hour. But even more
upsetting was the concern about who might be listening, which
(10:14):
was on a lot of people's minds because they were
all on something called a party line, which phone companies
spend a lot of time and money getting people used to.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
You and the other fellow on your line can help
each other to better telephone service by simply being good
party line neighbors.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Party lines were shared lines that connected a few houses
to the network. Most phone users had them, so picking
up the phone and overhearing someone else's conversation was a
regular thing. I find that tension really interesting. Here was
a device that lets you speak one on one to
someone far away from the privacy of your own home.
It invited secrets, but it also gave you the constant
(10:53):
awareness that someone might be able to hear them at
any time. I feel that now when I Google something
and then the next day see ads for it all
over the place. This moment the nineteen forties, when a
lot of people were getting their phones and Big Jim
was in La setting up his electronics business, I think
that feeling began to go mainstream by the way people
(11:14):
called him Big Jim Voss, because what else do you
call a guy who's six foot four weighs three hundred
and twenty four pounds and is pursuing his passion for
electronics in his parents' basement.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Believe me, that's lige. Don't look so startled you've been
wondering anyway.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Imagine a guy that size, with slicked hair and big
v neck lapels like a linebacker, who kind of looks
like Elvis if you squint. He stood a head taller
than pretty much anyone else. With his life of crime
behind him, Big Jim went straight with his electronics business
at his parents' house for like two seconds.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
One day, we were approached by the Los Angeles Police Department.
They wanted us to aid them in the development of
some equipment they thought would could have curbed crying.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
The LAPD had found Big Jim kind of by accident.
A cop on their vice squad, Officer Charles Stoker, was
investigating a tip about an alleged prostitute living in an
apartment building. The other tenants had been complaining. When Stoker arrived,
he checked in with the manager, who happened to be
Big Jim Voss, helping out a friend. Luckily for us,
(12:20):
Stoker was very much the hero of his own story
and later wrote about this fateful encounter in a memoir
called Thicker in Thieves, the nineteen fifty factual expose of
police payoffs, graft, political corruption, and prostitution in Los Angeles
and Hollywood. Stoker needed proof that the suspect was engaging
in prostitution, but it was going to be hard to
(12:40):
get the kind of evidence he needed, at least if
he was going to do it legally.
Speaker 9 (12:46):
One glance at the apartment, and I knew that the
arrest was going to be difficult, since defendans must be
caught in the act of sexual intercourse. The apartment had
a long hallway and the rooms were so far from
the outer door it would be virtually impossible to detect
incriminating conversation.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Big Jim was there observing all of this. Truthfully, he
didn't really care if one of the tenants was in
aging and prostitution. He later wrote, I was keeper of
no man's morals. But having watched the cops haplessly climb
a tree in an attempt to catch the woman in
the act, Big Jim sensed an opportunity. He revealed to
officer Stoker that his real job was electronics microphones. He
(13:28):
told them that he could bug the room and get
them the proof they needed. The cops were thrilled. This
plan wasn't exactly legal, but it probably seemed better than
the climbing trees thing. So Big Jim Voss got to work.
He hit a microphone in the room, and then they listened.
Speaker 9 (13:45):
To say that I was amazed what I heard would
be an understate.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Big Jim had struck gold. The vice squad cops loved him.
He began making them all kinds of wire tapping gizmos.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
We had one gadget that made it possible for us
who listen into telephone conversation, so that we didn't have
to go anywhere near the telephone in question, but we
could sit back on the other side of town and
hear all what was being said on that telephone.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Big Jim was kind of like Queue in James Bond.
He kept coming up with new ways for the cops
to spy on people. Mostly his innovations came from hiding
miniaturized microphones in places and recording what he heard on
a wire, an old recording format. He was especially proud
of something he called a talking cane, which allowed cops
to hear things through walls. It looked like a walking stick,
(14:45):
except it probably had a tiny microphone hidden in the
end and a wire running up the cane through the
cops sleeves to an amplifier and then to an earbud.
It also sent a signal wirelessly to a recording device
hidden in a car outside, so they could tape everything.
And then there were the wire taps that became Big
Jim's signature.
Speaker 10 (15:04):
Tectologically speaking, in the days of the Copper eelephone system,
the electro mechanical switching system, it was really quite easy
to tap a line.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
That's Brian Hawkman, director of American Studies at Georgetown University,
an author of the book The Listeners, a History of
wiretapping in the United States, And.
Speaker 10 (15:27):
It's Big Jim Voss who was a true pioneer in
the postwar electronic eavesdropping field and made an extraordinary name
for himself on both sides.
Speaker 7 (15:42):
Of the law.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Big Jim didn't make much money off the LAPD, but
as his reputation grew, he started getting more work around town.
He claimed to do a lot of work for movie stars. Specifically,
he said he'd tapped Mickey Rooney's phone so he could
prove his wife was having an affair.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
It's always interesting what goes on when people don't know
they're being listened to by so many people.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
I think this line of business is basically the same
as broadcasting his sister's date to the neighborhood kids, exposing
women by means of technology. The history of the telephone
and wiretapping is a history of privacy and concerns about
privacy which have always been gendered. We made a whole
episode about this a couple of years ago, The Invisible Lady.
You can listen to it on your phone on Apple
(16:29):
Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. Anyway, the idea of
an electronic ear sitting in your living room was worrisome
to the broader public, in part because it violated the
sanctity of the home, and also because nobody particularly seemed
interested in cracking down on it. Exhibit A. The cops
were hiring Big Jim to do more of it.
Speaker 10 (16:50):
One thing that's extraordinary to note, Despite the fact that
wire tapping was illegal in the state of California, private
eavesdroppers for hire advertised their services openly in the LA
Yellow Pages. And this was a business that was out
in the olden It was illegal, but it was never prosecuted,
(17:15):
and Boss emerges as a leader in this very strange
gray area industry.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Big Jim Voss, son of a preacher, two time convict
cat on his third life, was now simultaneously working for
a bunch of movie stars who wanted to expose There
soon to be ex spouses, rich men who wanted radar
guard at homes, and self righteous cops who wanted to
wire tap call girls phones.
Speaker 7 (17:41):
I don't think at the time he thought much at
all about the morality of the things he was doing.
I think he thought it was great fun.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
It probably was fun until Big Jim got in over
his head. We'll be right back. In nineteen forty eight,
Big Jim Voss was wire tapping all over Los Angeles.
(18:13):
He was basically a character in a film noir movie.
Already that same year, an actual film noir movie came
out that opened with an epigraph which reads to me
like a mission statement for Big Jim.
Speaker 11 (18:25):
And the tangled networks of a great city. The telephone
is the unseen link between a million lives. It is
a servant of our common needs, the confidant of our
inmost secrets.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Big Jim Voss was wired tapping all over those networks,
and he was about to get tangled up in something
pretty serious. Among the many clients he claimed cops, movie stars, businesses.
Big Jim had been working with a private detective who
turned out to have a connection to the mob. The
Mob realized he could use a guy like Big Jim,
(19:00):
so they called him up.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
One day, we were called after a little habitashery on
the Sunset Drip in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Big Jim drove out to the Habitashery, a little hat
shop on the Sunset Strip, and he made his way
to the back.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I was quite well impressed, first of all with the
steel doors that I passed through to get into it.
Secondly with its exquisite furnishing, walnut panels that ran from
ceiling to floor, suspended television set in the corner, red
leathered upholstered furniture in a semi circular death behind which
SATIS famed man Mickey Cohen.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Mickey Cohen was the head of the Los Angeles Underworld. Short,
bald guy with a pretty odd personality, a cold blooded
killer who loved eating ice cream and washed his hands
fifty times a day. In the back of that hat shop,
he explained the situation to Big Jim. The LAPD had
bugged Cohen's house. Cohen wanted Big Jim to find the bug.
He came by the next day piece of cake. Cohen
(20:01):
was impressed, and pretty quickly he hired Big Jim to
listen in on all of his enemies for him, including
the LAPD, for whom Big Jim had also been wired tapping.
He was a double agent, worked for the good guys
and the bad guys, except as I came to realize,
those were the same guys. In Los Angeles, there used
to be something known as the combination, the alliance between
(20:22):
city government, law enforcement, and the mob. Something like that
still existed in Big Jim's day, so he didn't have
to pick sides because there weren't really sides. He worked
for the LAPD and he worked for the Mob. He
got pretty cozy with them. Eventually he moved his electronics
shop onto the Strip, right alongside the mobbed up Habitashery.
(20:43):
The strip was outside city jurisdiction for quite some time.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
After engaging in this activity with mister Cohen, I found
it convenience to work for him on the one side,
and for law enforcement agencies.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
On the other Voss was still working with the LAPD.
Tapping the phones was amazingly useful for those guys, because
the phone has always been a kind of refuge for
the things people can't do in public. That's one way
to think about the telephone network as a kind of
shadow of public life, the place where secret lives and
longings go, things like prostitution. In the late nineteen forties,
(21:20):
Voss's main gig with the police had been helping Stoker
investigate probably the biggest prostitution ring in the city. It
was headed up by a woman named Brenda Allen. She
was a hard nosed businesswoman, glamorous, always in sunglasses. As
Time magazine put it, somewhat absurdly, she had a mind
like a cash register, and she hadn't been in love
(21:40):
since she was twenty one. Like Big Jim, She'd found
a good use for Los Angeles' vast telephone network. Brothels
were risky, they could be raided, all the foot traffic
would draw attention. But if you had a web of employees,
each with their own phone, the modern adam could function
like a telephone exchange. This is where the term call
girl comes from. Brenda Allen had one hundred and fourteen
(22:02):
of them all over town. She was always on the
phone setting up secret rendezvous, and Officer Stoker wanted Big
Jim to listen in. He wrote about the plan in his.
Speaker 9 (22:13):
Memoir We went to Brendan entered through the basement through
a rear door, and in short order Voss had tapped
rendered Lyne. There were more calls than she could possibly
hand them. As soon as she received one call and
dispatched a girl or girls, she would dial the telephone,
exchange them and contact. The operator would give her the
(22:35):
names of waiting customs.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
The scene was recreated in that movie Wiretapper, in loving detail.
You can see the real equipment, and the conversation is
straight from an account. Big Jim wrote of the night.
Speaker 12 (22:49):
Cord, who gave you this number? Why, mister Fielding, our
sales manager. Oh, yes, Well, we have some very nice
books the heroine and one is especially attractive, A brunette
about five for three ads like very interesting reading. How
(23:12):
about ten o'clock at the corner of Sunset and Lbrea.
There'll be a picture on the front cover, a girl
in a mink coat. That'll be fine. Goodbye.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Stoker in real life was thrilled. Now he wanted to
find out who the call girls were, so a day later,
Big Jim came by with a device that could record
all the numbers. Brenda Allen was dialing an impulse indicator,
jammed in that basement, probably sweating, breathing as quietly as possible.
(23:44):
Big Jim and Stoker gathered twenty nine numbers in one night,
most of them for girls working for Alan. It was
a huge coup. Stoker was greedy for more numbers, so
he came back the next night with Big Jim's device,
hooked it up to the wire, and began writing down
all the numbers. And then he saw a number that
(24:06):
he recognized, the number of the La Vice Squad his
own department.
Speaker 9 (24:14):
My ears twitching, my nostrils flared as I listened. When
someone answered Brenda's ring, she inquired if Sergeant Jackson.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Was in Moments later, according to Stoker's account, Stoker and
Big Jim were listening to one of the top aids
to the head of the vice squad as he talked
with the Cities number one madam about how much they
loved each other. The call also confirmed that the vice
squad was being paid off by Allan. The self righteous
stoker was aghast crooked cops in Los Angeles.
Speaker 9 (24:46):
At the time. I had high ideals concerning the Los
Angeles Police Department.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Big Jim suffered from no such idealism, and when he
teamed up with Mickey Cohen, he told the mob all
about the recordings. It was too good not to share
leverage on the cops. But when word got out about
Big Jim's recordings of Brenda Allen and the LAPD, the
situation spiraled why out of control. Here's how bad corruption
(25:14):
was in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties. There was
a grand jury that met every year to investigate corruption
in government. When they caught wind of Big Jim's blockbuster
Brenda Allen recordings, they launched an investigation. It exposed corruption
all over the place, mobbed up cops, Brenda Allen paying
people off. It was so bad that the chief of
(25:34):
the LAPD even stepped down. Everyone was turning on everyone else,
and somehow Big Jim Voss and his wiretap recordings were
right at the center of it all.
Speaker 7 (25:45):
The police was looking for these tapes that my father
had related to Brenda Allen. Then he wasn't giving them up.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Will Voss, Big Jim's son, the pastor.
Speaker 7 (25:55):
Again he was leading them on a wild goose chase.
You're sure these tapes agrees, yes. And then in the
midst of all grand jury trial, you know he committed
perjury implicating a police officer that you know that Cohen
wanted to go down the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
It was the fall of nineteen forty nine and Big
Jim was in a tight spot. Everything was splintering. He
couldn't wire tap and bug for everyone anymore. The LAPD
and Cohen weren't on good terms. There was a gang war,
and Big Jim was involved in this whole other scheme
that was jeopardizing his relationship with Cohen. Big Jim had
been one step ahead of everyone the whole time, but
(26:44):
now it was all catching up to him. He had
nowhere to turn. In that exact moment, the modern evangelical
movement came crashing into Big Jim's life.
Speaker 8 (26:56):
From Minneapolis comes a young evangelist, Billy Graham, to cooperate
with Christ for Great Heir Los Angeles in a Great
Revival campaign.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
You probably know the name Billy Graham. He brought the
evangelical movement to political power in this country. His Los
Angeles crusade was what would make him famous nationwide. Graham
set up in a huge revival tent at the corner
of Washington and Hill Streets. It was big news.
Speaker 8 (27:25):
There are sixty five hundred people seated here in this
canvas cathedral, and several thousands more stand around the sides
of the tent, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand total
attendants in two months.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Big Jim's preacher father was worried about him started trying
to get him to check out Graham. In a town
that loved celebrities, suddenly a preacher was one of the
most famous guys around. Down on his luck, Big Jim
decided to go.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
I thought to myself, well, I'll just drive by and
see what's packed. I saw some fifteen thousand people trying
to jam their way in. I drove on by. Then
I thought, well, i'll park walk back.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Big Jim was at this point a recognizable face from
all the press coverage of the grand jury investigation. Someone
saw him. He was hard to miss and went to
tell Graham that a hardened criminal was in the audience.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
And I muscled my way to the front of the
standing crowd. Some old lady got up and left her seat,
and I grabbed it and I sat down and listened
to the program, not enjoying it one bit.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Big Jim was uncomfortable. And then Graham came on stage
and began to preach this it's the climactic moment of
the movie Wiretapper.
Speaker 6 (28:48):
As I've stood here this evening, I felt all evening
that there's a man somewhere in this audience. He's heard
this message many times before, and the Spirit of God
is striving mightily with him at this moment, and if
he doesn't come to Christ now, he may never come.
We're going to wait a moment. There's still time for
you to come and give your life to Christ.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Big Jim said he felt like Graham was speaking straight
to him. He stood up, he walked to the front
of the Canvas Cathedral. He fell to his knees, and
he gave himself to God. That speech you've been hearing, we.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Had one gadget that made it possible for us to
listen in the telephone conversation.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
It's a sermon. Big Jim Voss cat on his fourth life.
After that night, he quit the mob joined up with
Billy Graham and helped to make him one of the
most famous religious figures of all time by preaching about
the telephone. We'll be right back. Some people were a
(30:04):
little suspicious of Big Jim Voss's conveniently timed conversion. Among
them Officer Charles Stoker.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
Voss got himself a new code of celestial varnish. He
said that he was tired of being a sinner and
wanted to return to God.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Now Stoker might have been a little too hard bitten there.
Voss did ultimately set up a much acclaimed ministry called
Youth Development Incorporated, tending the gangs in Harlem. But look,
this episode is not about the ultimate state of Big
Jim Voss's soul. It's about the telephone. Remember, and Big
Jim was literally standing at the source of the twentieth
century evangelical movement in America with his ear to the
(30:43):
country's phones. Brian Hawkman, wiretapping historian on the line once again.
Speaker 10 (30:50):
And Graham used Vassa's conversion as one of his great
kind of advertisements for his teachings.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Big Jim started spreading the Gospel of the reformed Wiretapper.
He even published a book with the help of Graham's network.
It's called Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, and it was
a hit. Then Graham's ministry made that movie in nineteen
fifty five, another success, albeit a really weird one. And
then Voss started touring the country trying to save souls,
(31:23):
and what he talked about all the time was his
career wire tapping. He even brought wiretapping gear on stage
with him.
Speaker 10 (31:30):
He was God's wiretap. Where God had been calling, he
had never picked up the phone, and finally he tapped
in at just the right moment.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
This was the early nineteen fifties. There was talk of
a bugging epidemic in America, but also a sense of
just how miraculous this technology was. Bill Labs, the famed
research arm of the telephone company AT and T, had
just invented the transistor, the electrical device that made possible
the miniaturization of everything, including the phone in your pocket.
Speaker 10 (32:01):
So the story that Boss tells his congregation, illustrated through
the eavesdropping devices, is that no man can hide from God.
If man can't hide from man, if all conversations can
be recorded, everything hidden can be known, how can man
(32:24):
hope to hide from God?
Speaker 7 (32:26):
Here?
Speaker 10 (32:27):
Were man made miracles, evidence of the almost divine power
of technology to change the world.
Speaker 13 (32:36):
And there's also, I guess, the sort of the way
in which your secret in our life is a saying
no normly to God that is now possibly also known
to man, and this is through things like the wire
tapping devices.
Speaker 10 (32:47):
Absolutely he titled his sermon no Place to Hide.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
This story has it all crime, corruption, electronics, evangelicals, but
I think the phone is the thing that brings it
all together. In Big Jim sermons and Billy Graham's wiretapper,
electronics are miracles to be wondered at. But they also
threatened to expose you to men like the old big Gym,
(33:13):
to take the secret things that once only God or
your priest and a confessional could have known, and broadcast
them to everyone. And it's kind of a classically American story.
No other country took to the phone as quickly or
as thoroughly as we did. People fretted about how the
suburban sprawl was telephone aided in a country this big,
(33:33):
the phone holds it all together. There's something really American
about that idea of this one vast, fragile system connecting
all these crazy disparate lives together, wiretappers to preachers, call
girls to cops. It's like democracy as a technology, but
again like a shadow democracy. The phone is what you
use for the things you don't want to be seen
(33:54):
in public, the place you lead your secret life, whatever
that consists of. It reminds me of those nine hundred
numbers that became a big deal in the nineteen eighties,
which were famously used for phone sex and also for spiritualists.
That's kind of always been the thing with the phone,
secret longings and spiritualism. A lot of people thought maybe
you could reach the spirit world through the telephone lines.
(34:17):
All this to say, the experience of hearing a voice
from miles away almost instantaneously, it collapsed time and space
in a completely unreal, visceral way. And because it lets
you share things privately without showing your face, it invited confessions.
It's always created this kind of otherworldly private feeling that
(34:37):
religion deals with. That's part of why I think Big
Jim's wiretapping was such a rich vehicle for any evangelical message.
But that message, as Graham used it, was a little
Old Testament. The phone's like a God who hears all
and spares no one. It's a connection to all the
sin coursing through the country. Like that poster for Wiretapper
(34:58):
of the movie said, if you're on the phone, you're
not safe. But there was another side to it. As
Big Jim was touring the country talking about the phone
and wiretapping and the state of his audience's soul, another
religious movement was beginning in Ocean Away that was also
all about the phone. So let's leave Big Jim Voss
(35:19):
for a minute and make a long distance call from
the northeast under the sea on the cable that stretches
from North America along the ocean floor and up the
craggy Rocks to England, down the winding streets of London
to a church Saint Stephen Wahlberg, a church that had
(35:42):
been bombed out during the Blitz. It's nineteen fifty three
and an Anglican vicar named Chad Vera is starting the
very first suicide hotline.
Speaker 14 (35:54):
Vera had for a long time been really aware of
suicide and suicidality and been very preoccupied by the pain
that suicidality and suicide brought into communities, alongside, of course
the loss of individuals.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Hannah's Even is a historian of science who wrote a
book called The Distance Cure, A History of Teletherapy. Most
people think suicide hotlines are a secular kind of therapy,
but they came from the Church at a post war
moment when the suicide rate was rising in the US
and the UK. Chad Vera that Anglican vicar was trying
to figure out how to address it, and so.
Speaker 14 (36:32):
Vera in the early nineteen fifties had become not only
really preoccupied with the fact that there was this increase
in suicidality in this society, but also that there weren't
social mechanisms for intervening and helping those in crisis, not
only because it's unspeakable and all of the things that
might trouble someone so greatly or unspeakable, but also because
(36:55):
it was a felony.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
To the cops. Suicide was a crime. To the church,
it was a sin. So who could hear suicidal people
talk about it? They were totally isolated.
Speaker 14 (37:07):
Well, he really understood was that in a urgencies, right,
we are conditioned to reach for the telephone then as
now it's a different form of telephone, no doubt, but
that that was already a kind of habitast of your
any given individual. Nine one one as a formulation didn't
exist for some time in the US. In the UK,
that history is a little bit different, right, They did
(37:29):
have a unified number already, So it makes sense in
terms of telephone history, right that British folks were already
conditioned to call nine nine nine. So instead of putting
fire and police, and also while not making it, a psychiatrist,
Vera knew that we needed some kind of his society
needed some kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Vera decided to make a kind of telephone church. No
physical congregation, just phones and Vera with a secretary, Vivian Prosser,
offering counseling to people contemplating suicide twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 7 (38:06):
Then Vera got to work.
Speaker 14 (38:08):
He writ he offered this kind of serracutic confessional remediated.
And it was so popular because immediately it became a
feel good story in the popular person.
Speaker 7 (38:18):
On the radio.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Vera was offering a kind of half psychoanalysis, half pastoral counseling.
But the key thing was the telephone, the privacy of
that conversation, the anonymity had offered, and the connection to
someone when you needed them most. It was a brilliant
idea and immediately it was extremely popular, and.
Speaker 14 (38:39):
So Vera and Prosser couldn't handle the urgency of the
calls on their own, and it couldn't be truly twenty
four hours a day. That was another problem. So in
order to meet the demand for help over the phone
in its earliest moment, Vera trained fifty volunteers.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
It kind of reminded me of Brenda Allen's call Girl Network,
the private thing that someone wouldn't seek out in public
but could ask for on the phone. It's like a
system of tunnels under polite society, connecting someone filled with
despair and bedroom to a kindly ear in a blitz
bam church in London.
Speaker 14 (39:14):
And I just love this. The term of art is befriending,
which is this kind of ancient Christian term remade as
this new person to person, that mediated form of care.
And this is a Samaritans, which is the world's oldest
and also most used suicide hotline, and it's still active today.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Various ideas spread all over the world. The hotline went
on to take a lot of different forms, but it
was right there in the nineteen fifties a big news
story right alongside Big Jim's conversion narrative, two stories about
invisible listeners, overhearing you at your lowest point, and understanding
who you really are. Since the nineteen fifties, there have
(40:12):
been hotlines and dial of something services for pretty much
everything you can imagine, from the serious like nine to
eight eight today's National Suicide Hotline in the US, or
hotlines Fraid's Information in the nineteen eighties, to the less
serious nine five one two, six ' two three zero
six two Santa's Hotline six ' four to one seven
(40:33):
nine three eight one two two dial a pone. Even
Big Jim Voss started one one eight hundred hit Home,
a hot line for runaway kids looking for shelter. Will Voss,
big Jim's son, remembers working for it when he was
in college.
Speaker 7 (40:49):
I did do a lot of listening to kids, and
you know, I didn't I didn't have to prompt them
very much, you know, to pour their hearts out. It
to stappen naturally.
Speaker 13 (41:01):
It would have happened in the same way if you'd
been face to face with them.
Speaker 7 (41:05):
Probably not. Yeah, I think the anonymity really helped.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
The anonymity helps the phones a tool of alienation, the
phones a vehicle for connection. It turns out both things
are true. And what's amazing to me about these big
stories that people were using to understand the phone in
the fifties wiretaps and hotlines, is they've got these shadows,
spiritual messages. I think the phone still has those vestiges
(41:31):
baked into it. It's like a tiny god in your pocket,
wire tapping everything you say, surveilling and sometimes saving. The
(41:53):
Last Archive is written and hosted by me Ben Natapaffrey.
It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
this episode by Arthur Gombert's sound design by Jake Gorsky
and Lucy solib Our. Executive producers are Sophie Crane and
Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton Pushkin's executive editor.
(42:17):
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell
Wagon Symphonet. Many of our sound effects are from Harry
Jannette Junior in the Stargenette Foundation Special. Thanks to Gary Goff,
Emily Bills, Emily Bannis, and Lydia Jencott. Archival audio courtesy
of Buswell Library and Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton College, Illinois.
(42:38):
For a bibliography, further reading, and a transcript and teaching
guide to this episode, head to the Last Archive dot com.
The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. If
you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering
bonus content and ad free listening across our network for
four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus
(42:58):
channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, and
please sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm
slash Newsletter. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ben Nanna Faffrey.
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