The incident that led to the revelation of the circus's secret campaign against Pottker and animal rights groups was a bizarre dispute between Feld and his right-hand man, Charles Smith -- one that led to Feld firing Smith in 1997.
According to a 163-page deposition given by Joel Kaplan, a wisecracking, middle-aged private eye who had handled security for the Felds for 20 years (despite four felony convictions for illegal wiretapping along the way) Smith had Kaplan install bugs and hidden video cameras in the home and office of his -- Smith's -- own girlfriend, also on the Feld payroll, whom Smith suspected of sleeping with other men.
Kaplan also testified that he had bugged and videotaped Richard Froemming, who headed Feld's spying unit against PETA and other animal-rights groups, because Smith suspected Froemming of sleeping with her, too. Kaplan claimed he threaded the video and audio cables back to Smith's office, where tape recorders whirred silently "under his couch."
In Nixon-like fashion, Smith was "obsessed with taping," Kaplan testified. "You could walk into his office, he had five tape recorders laying on his desk. He had a punch bowl, party-size punch bowl with 150 tapes in it. You could see it right there. He had tapes all over his desk. He had boxes of empty tapes, boxes of unused tapes. He had videotapes. So he took a quantity of some of these tapes and put them in a bag."
One day in March 1997, Smith ordered a young gofer to gather up and destroy the tapes. At the same time, Smith asked him to go to his -- Smith's -- erstwhile girlfriend's house and bring back a Jeep he'd given her. But the gofer got his instructions mixed up and instead delivered the bag of tapes to Smith's girlfriend. ("He's a nice boy," Kaplan said of the young man in his deposition, "but rowing with one oar out of the water.")
Smith panicked when he heard what happened. But it was too late. The girlfriend had called the Fairfax cops, who launched an investigation. So did the FBI, three sources said. The tapes they found had recorded Smith's own voice telling Kaplan on the phone, "We have got to get, you know, the wires, man."
Hoisted on his own petard, Smith was arrested on suspicion of violating state and federal wiretapping laws.
The FBI investigated further, according to sources, but in the end the Assistant U.S. Attorney's office in Alexandria declined to prosecute. ("They just sat on it, and sat on it, and sat on it," one lawyer involved in the case said.) And although the police eventually dropped the charges against Smith and expunged his record, a Virginia jury last May awarded Smith's ex-girlfriend $500,000, to be paid equally by Smith and Feld Entertainment, for the wiretapping, according to a brief report in the Washington Post. The videotapes Kaplan described in his affidavit were not mentioned.
But Feld fired Smith. Then, Kaplan claimed Feld wouldn't pay him $274,000 he was owed. Smith, who would not return calls from Salon for this article, filed suit against Feld for over $6 million in stock options and back pay. Kaplan sued for the money he claimed he was owed. And while Feld would eventually settle with both of them -- Smith for $6 million, Kaplan for about $250,000, sources said -- the damage was done.
Next page: A PETA infiltration unveiled