CURRENTS: INVESTIGATIONS
The Scary Circus

BY JAY CHESHES

Strange things started happening to Jeff Stein’s phone late last summer. Right after he’d finish with a call the phone would ring again, but there’d be nobody there. There were odd clicks on the other end of the line, as if someone were listening in and then hanging up. He’d call for his voice mail and get redirected to another number. He’d come home to find a number on his caller ID that would turn out to be disconnected. Stein called a friend at the phone company and described the situation. “Sounds to me like you’re tapped,” confided his friend.

At the time, Stein, a longtime investigative reporter in Washington who has covered the intelligence community for such publications as GQ and Talk, had just completed a two-part, 9,000-word story involving former spies, break-ins, subterfuge, wiretaps — and that fine pillar of family entertainment, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. His subsequent phone troubles, he thinks, are not unrelated.

Stein’s piece, which ran on Salon at the end of August, is a bizarre tale of corporate power run amuck. According to a mountain of records Stein unearthed in D.C. Superior Court, Ken Feld, the man who heads the circus — part of the Feld Company, the most profitable live-entertainment company in the world — is one very vindictive honcho. More than a decade ago, according to the story, Feld declared war on an unsuspecting free-lance writer named Jan Pottker. In 1990 she had written an unflattering portrait of the circus in the now-defunct Regardie’s magazine that described Feld’s deceased father, Irvin, who bought the circus in 1967, as a philandering bisexual.

Court records — including a sworn statement by Clair George, the former head of covert operations at the CIA — show that Feld responded to Pottker’s story by hiring George to organize a dirty-tricks campaign aimed at derailing Pottker’s life and career, going as far as enlisting a bogus literary agent to steer her away from a book project on the circus by offering her other deals funded, without her knowledge, by the circus itself. Another man, a shadowy free-lance writer on George’s team, spent several years cultivating a friendship with Pottker that allowed the circus to keep close tabs on her. “I was a puppet on a string,” Pottker said recently, during her first on-the-record interview. “I was Ken Feld’s Truman Story.”

“Every investigative reporter will suspect from time to time that invisible sinister forces have retaliated against them,” says Stein. “This material was just extraordinary.”

Kerry Lauerman, Stein’s editor at Salon, was equally floored when he learned of the story during a lunch meeting with his writer at a Washington restaurant. “It was really a jaw-dropper,” he recalls. “But Jeff’s documentation was so thorough that there was no doubting it.”

Although Pottker first filed her lawsuit against the circus in 1999 — she is seeking $100 million in damages — Stein’s story was the first piece of journalism on the subject. Now, he fears that the circus is going after him too.

After his story was published, Clair George’s lawyers subpoenaed Stein for his notes and sources. Stein’s theory is that they hope to use him to throw Pottker’s case off course, seeking to prove, or at least insinuate, that she tipped him off to the story and slipped him information that should have been sealed. Stein denies the charge, and says that he learned of the story from a colleague. He has contacted a lawyer friend who agreed to help him fight the subpoena.

Roger Simmons, Pottker’s lawyer, says he’s spent the last few months fighting to prove that neither he nor his client ever leaked any information to Stein. Catherine Ort-Mabry, director of corporate communications for the Feld Company, declined to comment on pending litigation. She called the idea that Stein’s phone is tapped by the circus “far-fetched.”

Stein and Pottker may not be the only journalists who have had run-ins with Feld. After Stein’s piece appeared, Bill Thomas, another Washington journalist and the author of several books on political intrigue, who years ago wrote a story on the Feld Company for Washingtonian magazine, phoned Jan Pottker to discuss the story. A few days later, he says, his wife dialed their home number only to find herself redirected to the switchboard at circus headquarters.

Stein says he will not let the circus story go. He hopes to revive the brief flurry of movie interest that surfaced last summer, and in the meantime plans to head back down to the D.C. courthouse to begin work on the next chapter of the Ringling Brothers saga. He’s convinced that George and his team — court records indicate that they not only spied on Pottker, but also on animal rights groups that have been fighting the circus — may have been involved in a whole range of covert activities that haven’t yet come to light.