From: "Matt Crawford" <crawdad@fnal.gov>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 10:56:54 -0700 (PDT)
To: Phil Karn <karn@qualcomm.com>
Subject: Re: Position escrow (triangulation, cell "remailers")
In-Reply-To: <199804221733.KAA25507@servo.qualcomm.com>
Message-ID: <199804231756.MAA16999@gungnir.fnal.gov>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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http://handel.pacific.net.sg/~seowjean/Mafia/mobname-c.html ...

Callahan, Gerald Michael 
(AKA: Cheesebox Callahan), 1909- 

Gerald Callahan was born and raised on the tough Lower East Side of New
York.  His father was a corrupt Prohibition agent who took payoffs from
bootleggers operating in lower Manhattan.  Through his father, who had some
loose ties to Tammany Hall, Callahan received his introduction to members of
the criminal underworld.

Gerry Callahan was good with his hands and proficient in electronics,
talents that served him well in later life.  After completing a two-year
course in electronics at a small college in Texas, Callahan worked at Bell
Laboratories, where he perfected his craft.

Armed with a wealth of knowledge, he quickly earned a reputation as the man
to see in the underworld if you needed a wire tapped or a phone bugged.  In
1931 Al Capone brought him to Chicago where he was hired to tap into the
racing wire, perfected by Mont Tennes who owned the Nationwide News
Service.  For years, Tennes and his associates had refused to allow the
Capone gang a partnership or a cut of the take.

The "wire," as it was known, disseminated race results to hundreds of
poolrooms and bookie operations directly from the tracks.  It was Callahan's
job to tap into the phone boxes, enabling the syndicate men to disrupt
Nationwide's service by sending along incorrect race results and payoff
information to the poolrooms.

Another favorite technique was to hold back results long enough for the
Capone men to get a bet down at the parlor even though the race had been
run.  "We wrecked at least twenty bookies, all of them big operators,"
Callahan recalled.  "We took a fortune from them.  The big guy in Florida
(Capone) was very happy, and I went back to New York with a suitcase full of
green."

Callahan completed at least 1,000 similar wiring jobs in his career and
never spent a day in jail, though he was twice convicted of violating the
New York wiretap law.  In each instance he drew suspended sentences.  In the
1950s Gerald Callahan earned the famous nickname he actually detested--
Cheesebox.  Working from his kitchen table in Flushing, N.Y., he invented a
small electronic device resembling a cheesebox.  It was a bookie's dream.
The cheesebox permitted a gambler to connect two telephones and speak with
his customers from a remote location.  This virtually guaranteed that a
horse parlor would be free of police raids.  Callahan installed his
cheesebox at a cost of $250 per unit and charged $100 a week in rental.  In
1960 he earned revenue from sixty of these devices functioning in the New
York area.

Callahan wore many hats in his day.  He was a self-described card cheat,
second-story man, and bookie.  Though he was out of the business by 1972,
the veteran wiretapper admitted that he would have enjoyed bugging the
Watergate Hotel.  "Only I wouldn't have used an army of men," he told a
reporter in 1975.  "I always worked alone.  I would have taken out (tapped)
every phone a distance away and set up recorders.  There's no way I would
have been trapped."  His autobiography, Cheesebox, written with Paul Meskil,
was published in 1975.