July 18, 2010

wiretapper for the mob (bibles viii)


There was Jim Vaus, the notorious double agent type, who had worked simultaneously for the LA Police department and organized crime, specifically Mickey Cohen who was being investigated by the LA Police Department at the time.

An electronic whiz, he was a master of the wire-tap and all manner of listening devices. The LAPD used him to put bugs in the homes of gangsters. Then, working for the gangsters, Vaus would take the bugs out, or certainly alert his crime bosses know their whereabouts. And he got paid by both sides. Before he got really caught by either side, he got saved at Billy Graham’s first really big Crusade for Christ held in Los Angeles in 1949. He became an evangelist, using his electronic wizard for on stage demonstrations during speaking engagements at churches and conferences. He was completing a weeks of speaking at my family’s church the night I was born. He later went to work in Harlem defusing gangs again using the diversion of electronics to communicate the good news.