Friday, Jul 4, 2008
On Sept. 4, 1996, Feld's men reported that Pottker had been musing about doing a book on Estee Lauder, but she still hadn't dropped the circus idea. Her new twist was to compare the Felds' stewardship of Ringling Bros. with that of their predecessor, J.R. North. And now, they reported, she planned to ask for help from Ken's sister Karen Feld, as well as Alan Bloom, who began working for the circus at age 11 in 1947.
Clair George's latest news no doubt sent Ken Feld right out of his chair. Now Feld's operatives began scrambling for more information on what Karen Feld was up to. George hand-wrote a memo to Eringer headed "TOP SECRET," and beneath that, "Project Preempt."
"Karen is not cooperating at this point," he reported.
After surviving the triple traumas of her mother's suicide, her father's eccentric behavior, and her own brother's effort to evict her, Karen had finally achieved a foothold on emotional stability. She still had the Georgetown house. She had her syndicated column, "Capital Connections," and a Web site, which not only made her a regular in the city's media-and-politics social whirl, but got her picture taken with Barbara Bush, and then with the Clintons. But close friends knew that she had long mulled the idea of her own book on the family enterprise.
It's not readily clear how George and Eringer found out what was on her mind, although Karen knew that her brother was employing the ex-CIA man. "She said Ken had hired him to spy on her," claims a friend in whom she confided.
However they found out, Clair George reported to Feld that "Karen vehemently insists" she hasn't helped Pottker, according to another of his memos in the court file. "I'm a writer," he quoted her as saying. "Why should I tell my stories to another writer? When I'm ready, I'll write them myself."
"Karen claims her book on the Feld family would be explosive," the memo continued. It said she'd had problems defining the book. It went on to further describe her vacation house in Maine, which she calls "a writer's hideaway -- a place to write her book one day." Karen also claimed to have many sources inside the Feld organization, according to the report.
"Whenever someone is fired," George reported her saying, "they call me." (So far, Karen Feld has yet to publish anything on her family.)
It was one of their last reports. In March 1997, Feld fired Chuck Smith, his vice president and go-to guy for dirty tricks and espionage, after the secret videotapes he'd made of his girlfriend fell into her hands and he was arrested by the police. With Smith's abrupt exit Clair George, Robert Eringer and the soon-to-be repentant wiretapper Joel Kaplan were also cut loose. The spying operation was about to crash and burn.
"I told Chuck ..." said Alan Bloom, who worked a half century for the circus before Feld let him go, after one suit had led to another like a row of dominoes, "tinkering with the press was a bad -- a bad thing to do, that it shouldn't be done." "Chuck loved to deal in ... espionage," Bloom added in his deposition. "I think he had delusions about his involvement with -- whether it be the FBI or CIA or whatever." (Smith in fact once worked for the FBI, but not as an agent.) "I mean, he told me so many stories that I just threw them off after a while. Very paranoid man."
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