In the early 1960s, law enforcement officers from the FBI and the IRS descended on Pittsburgh to investigate organized crime figures and corrupt public officials on mob payrolls. Federal agents used confidential informants, private company records, and electronic surveillance to make cases against such mob leaders including numbers bosses Tony Grosso, Kelly Mannarino, and Meyer Sigal. They also pursued Pittsburgh police beat officers who collected payoffs for their supervisors, including Assistant Police Superintendent Lawrence J. Maloney.
Lawrence J. Maloney, pictured in 1948 when he led a special racketeering investigations unit. Source: historicpittsburgh.org.
Congress in 1965 authorized an investigation into the administrative procedures in federal agencies related to how they collect information on citizens. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee had a $150,000 budget to investigate federal agency procedures that might imperil citizens’ constitutional rights to privacy.
The subcommittee heard testimony from federal agency officials, private detectives, and the citizens who were the subjects of criminal investigations, including Tony Grosso. Senators had found themselves in an advanced course in modern surveillance techniques and they learned about all of the covert ways cases were being built against organized crime figures and corrupt officials. The Senate investigations uncovered the use of a phony Bell Telephone truck that IRS agents had used to place and monitor wiretaps.
Sheldon Cohen, then-Commissioner of the IRS, described the Pittsburgh investigations to the senators:
The third instance occurred in 1964 in the Greater Pittsburgh area, in connection with their income tax evasion investigation of a suspected participant in an alleged large-scale and wide-scale corruption of public officials. Several agents of the Pittsburgh Intelligence Operation participated in the installation and operation of devices to listen in on transmitters over three telephones used by the suspect and one of his suspected principal contacts in the illegal gambling. I might say in this situation, it was brought to the attention of our intelligence operation in Pittsburgh that the city police had been running a protection operation for the local gambling operation. They had kept in divided territories. They had sold locations and this money was funneling God knows where into political corruption and into vice and so forth. In this situation again, these agents over stepped the legal rights of this gentleman. I do not deny that.
Lawrence Maloney was the public official Cohen described on July 13, 1965. Missouri Senator Edward V. Long then showed Cohen a photograph. “I have here a picture of what is apparently a Bell Telephone truck.”
“That truck is owned, I believe, by our intelligence operation in the Pittsburgh area,” Cohen replied.
That exchange sent the proceedings down a rabbit hole into how the IRS procured the truck, camouflaged it, and then used it to place wiretaps in Pittsburgh. After Cohen’s first round of testimony ended, the subcommittee called the Pittsburgh IRS agents to testify.
William D. Marsh was a supervisor in the agency’s intelligence division during the Pittsburgh investigations. He bought the 1954 GMC truck for $318 at Marion Hill Auto Sales, a used car lot in New Brighton, a Beaver County, Pennsylvania, a city about 38 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh. Marsh told the senators that the truck he bought was one of five used telephone company vehicles on the lot.
Elwood City Ledger, October 26, 1972.
“I selected the 1-ton size because it would be large enough for a person to hide inside the truck in order that the truck could be used for surveillance and observation purposes,” Marsh testified.
1950s-vintage Bell Telephone truck showing interior bins. Source: Pinterest.
But why a telephone truck? Marsh told senators, “A telephone truck can freely travel throughout the city of Pittsburgh without arousing any undue attention or suspicion.”
Marsh and his agents repainted the truck and modified it for surveillance. “Bell Telephone trucks have many bins, storage bins built inside them, shelves and whatnot,” Marsh explained. “I personally took the shelves and storage bins, most of them, out of the truck in order that somebody could fit inside the truck.”
Senators continued to question IRS field agents and the agency head about the Pittsburgh truck and others. They even compelled the agency to drive the truck from Pittsburgh to Washington so they could see it in person. Pittsburgh’s “wiretap truck” made headlines across the United States.
The Miami Herald, July 15, 1965.
The testimony revealed that the agency had purchased old telephone trucks that were used for surveillance in Philadelphia, in addition to Pittsburgh. The IRS also bought three additional trucks that it camouflaged to look like telephone trucks; those trucks were used in other cities throughout the United States.
Fort Lauderdale News, July 14, 1965.
Evidence presented in the hearings exposed widespread invasions of privacy by the IRS. Pittsburgh mobsters and corrupt officials played key, accidental roles in ending the agency’s use of wiretaps. The “wiretap truck” was one of several surveillance techniques federal agents used to nab racketeers and crooked cops in Pittsburgh. Besides telephone taps, senators heard about bugged offices, polygraphs, and picked locks.
The IRS subsequently announced that it would no longer use surveillance techniques prohibited under federal and state laws. Two years after the Senate hearings concluded, IRS Commissioner Cohen confessed to Senator Long that the agency’s breaches were more serious than the hearings revealed. Cohen admitted that the IRS had “improperly” used wiretaps 287 times between 1958 and 1966.
Seven years after the Senate hearings, burglars with wiretapping gear entered Democratic party headquarters in a Washington office complex called the Watergate ….
© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein
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