Secret police recording of live shows was used to prosecute Lenny Bruce.

Evidence

Le Metro managed to reinstate their readings but on April 3, Howard Solomon, manager of Café Au Go Go, a new club located in the basement of 152 Bleecker Street, was busted along with his headliner Lenny Bruce—both men were charged with “indecent performance.” The new NYPD Public Morals Squad had secretly recorded two of Bruce’s shows and played the tapes for a quickly assembled grand jury, which determined the evidence was sufficient to prosecute. The trial was set for April 23, effectively extending Bruce’s now mega-publicized engagement that resulted in a second arrest on April 7, the comic booked with Solomon’s wife Ella. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 514

Categorization

• XREF: The grand-jury-from-secret-tapes mechanism prefigures modern search-warrant and surveillance controversies — a through-line from 1964 NYPD to contemporary sting tactics.