The Wiretapper

Smiling through her pain, the young woman is wheeled into the delivery room for her first baby while the nurse tries vainly to notify the father. Where can he be? Far from the hospital, he has just installed an ingenious electronic warning system in the house of a gangster. He and his criminal client are admiring it when suddenly the alarm sounds; a time bomb has just been shoved through a cellar window. At the very moment the doctor in the hospital snips the umbilical cord of the baby girl, the young father', sweating with tension, snips the bomb's wires and saves the gangster's life. This is a high point in a movie called Wiretapper, designed by ex-Wiretapper Jim Vaus to bring sinners to repentance by dramatizing his own life on the fringe of big-time wrongdoings. Wiretapper (starring Bill Williams and Georgia Lee) has its world premiere in Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium this week before an admission-free audience (it is still uncertain whether it will be distributed commercially). Wiretapper is the latest and possibly most potent weapon in the arsenal of a personable young evangelist. No Collection Problems. In 1947 Jim Vaus was a Los Angeles electronics engineer in business for himself. Doing illegal wiretapping for the police to collect evidence on a call-girl racket brought him publicity, and publicity got him into the lucrative line of tapping the phones of Hollywood stars. Wrote Jim, in Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, the basis of his movie: "Men of this caliber are always after information about the private activities of their current heartbeat . . . The part I liked about this business was that there were no collection problems. If I couldn't get the price I wanted from one side, I could always sell out to the other side. In fact, just the threat of doing so usually secured immediate payment." After such free-lance blackmail, he was spotted as a comer by big crime's talent scouts. Behind a steel-plated door in the rear of his toney haberdashery, Racketeer Mickey Cohen began to peel off $100 bills and to the bemused gaze of Wiretapper Vaus, the long green "became a diamond ring for Alice, chromium accessories for my car, a new tailor-made suit, a hand-painted tie . . ." But the highlight of Jim's criminal career was a slick trick for improving his judgment of race horses. He would cut into the direct Teletype wire between a bookie and the race track, take the race results on his own Teletype, and signal a confederate to place last-minute bets with the unsuspecting bookie before feeding the delayed tape back into the bookie's wire again. He was about to leave for St. Louis to make a new installation of this type when he stepped into a Billy Graham rally. At first he just sat there "looking around, picking out a man who needed a haircut or one whose suit was ill-fitting across the back. I ignored the better-dressed people, and tried to justify my past actions by deciding the poorly dressed ones were the Christians." But by the time Billy Graham had reached the last words of his "invitation," Jim Vaus had stumbled over to the prayer tent and fallen on his knees. To Reach the Unreached. Since then, Wiretapper Vaus has been Evangelist Vaus. Following the footsteps of his fundamentalist preacher father, he travels from pulpit to pulpit in a panel truck with $18,000 worth of electronic equipment. He sets it up in churches, and rivets audiences with his electronic demonstration--stereophonic sound effects, high-voltage cracklings through the human body, experiments with sound and light beyond human range. This makes a preacher's point: "You don't feel everything, you don't hear everything, you don't see everything--yet you say that you don't believe what you don't feel, see and hear!" His audiences are large, and his "love offerings" average more than $3,000 a month, all of which goes into his Missionary Communication Service, a nonprofit foundation to provide electronic equipment to missionaries around the world. Vaus, his wife Alice and three children live on $400 a month. Missionary Communication Service stands to profit by the movie version of Jim's life. Except for an inspirational ending, it is an orthodox crime thriller, complete "with gunplay and side-mouthed snarls. The big conversion scene shows Billy Graham at work, and he might move some spectators as he did the movie's hero. But after a recent Los Angeles preview, one preacher rose to strike a blow for those who abhor the idea of luring people into the sinful movie house, even on God's behalf. Ex-Sinner Vaus came back at him fast: "This movie wasn't designed to reach the righteous," he said. "It was designed to bring sinners to God. It was designed to reach the unreached."

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