Secret Recording Grows Safer as ‘the Wire’ Grows Tinier

“I run the Queens County Republican Party. Nobody else runs the party,” the politician, Vincent Tabone, says, according to a criminal complaint unsealed last week.

Then, Mr. Tabone, 46, a baby-faced veteran of local and state politics, appeared to grow cautious. Just before accepting a $25,000 bribe, he patted down the agent, ostensibly to check for a recording device, federal prosecutors allege in the complaint.

The moment was reminiscent of the 1970s and ’80s, when undercover agents recorded conversations with mobsters using a bulky tape recorder strapped around their waists, and wires — connected to a microphone — secured to their chests with an adhesive. Today, in an age when technology has gone wireless, the phrase “wearing a wire” is a largely allegorical term of art.

“In the old days, they would say, ‘Let me pat you down for a wire’ and boom, everybody would just open their shirt and say, ‘I’m not wearing a wire,’ ” a retired undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Joaquin Garcia, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Now there is no need to wear a wire. It’s become extinct. It’s all gone digital. But what are you going to say, ‘I’m wearing digital,’ instead of ‘I’m wearing a wire’? It’s just become part of the parlance of law enforcement.”

Technological advances aside, the methods have remained the same, with federal agents and undercover officers using covert recording equipment to ensnare would-be criminals, sometimes with the help of a well-placed informer or cooperating witness.

“Technology has made it so easy to plant a device that is much less detectable,” Richard B. Zabel, deputy United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview last week. “Yes, people are conscious of being recorded, but as you’ve seen, in some cases they are not able to find the recorder anyway.”

Nowadays, recording equipment is miniaturized. “Your options have increased a lot because the devices are a lot smaller,” Mr. Zabel said. “They can really hide them now in buttons, in pens, at the point of a pen, in a cuff link or the edge of a tie clip.”

And frisking an undercover agent for a wire, as Mr. Tabone allegedly did, can be as fruitless as finding a pay phone and “dropping a dime” to call the police.

“That is sort of an antiquated way to look for a device,” Mr. Zabel said.

Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Tabone, vice chairman of the Queens Republican Party, with bribery and wire fraud for allegedly taking cash in exchange for using his influence to secure a ballot spot for State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, a Democrat, in the Republican primary for mayor. Mr. Smith, along with a Republican city councilman, Daniel J. Halloran III, and a Republican Party leader from the Bronx, Joseph J. Savino, were also charged. The criminal case was built, in large part, on secret recordings.

It was the first of two instances last week where federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint against New York political leaders, using their own words against them.

On Thursday, two days after the corruption case centered on Mr. Smith’s mayoral aspirations became public, the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, announced new charges in an unrelated bribery case. In that case, cooperating witnesses, including Assemblyman Nelson L. Castro, who has since resigned, wore devices to record conversations that led to the arrest of Eric A. Stevenson, a Democratic state assemblyman who was accused of accepting more than $22,000 in bribes to help developers open adult day care centers in his district in the South Bronx.

In one recording, officials said, Mr. Stevenson invokes previous scandals in Albany and openly worries about being taped. “Be careful of those things, man, the recorders and all those things,” Mr. Stevenson says to a cooperating witness, according to the criminal complaint.

Mr. Zabel and other federal officials declined to reveal exactly how the recordings in the two recent cases were made. “We don’t want people to know what we can do, but we don’t mind people thinking that we can do all kinds of things,” an F.B.I. spokesman, James Margolin, said last week.

As for the recordings of Mr. Tabone and other suspects in the two cases, Mr. Margolin said, “I presume that it wasn’t the kind of devices that we used in the 1980s,” similar to the one depicted in movies like “Prince of the City,” the 1981 film starring Jerry Orbach and Treat Williams, who plays a New York City narcotics detective who wears a wire to expose police corruption.