Television's Tiniest Stars
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
November 20, 2002SAN DIEGO — Questioning Mitchell Wagenberg can be unnerving, not least because he is apt to videotape the encounter through his eyeglasses or through a rivet on his belt.
"I might as well just give the ballgame away right now," he said here recently after an hour's conversation, fumbling to reveal a minuscule camera in his shirt button. "Of course, I am completely wired, talking to you. Everything's being recorded."
Mr. Wagenberg, known as the "king of the hidden camera" to a tiny elite of news media and law enforcement representatives who regularly employ him, may be a privacy advocate's worst nightmare. He has made a business of turning private moments into very public affairs.
Over the last 15 years, his Manhattan company,
StreeTVision, has provided equipment and services for
undercover investigations by CBS's "60 Minutes" and "48
Hours," NBC's "Dateline," ABC's "20/20," and public
television's "
J. Emilio Flores for The New York
Times From StreeTVision, a camera masked by a screw and a
tiny video recorder. |
|
Universal Television Hidden cameras are
used in NBC's "Crime & Punishment." |
Mr. Wagenberg is deliberately a stranger to the millions who have gaped at his work. But his hidden-camera film clips, he said, have helped win Emmy Awards for several programs that relied on his devices, which include an infrared camera, a motion detector and a time-lapse VCR buried inside a water purifier for a "20/20" segment on criminal behavior in nursing homes.
But although he is a hero in some quarters, his work is anathema to many who lobby against electronic snooping. "Guys like Wagenberg, I don't know how they can live with themselves," said Neville Johnson, a Los Angeles lawyer who specializes in privacy litigation. Mr. Johnson was recently on the losing side of a lawsuit against ABC in which he represented three New Jersey police officers who were caught by Mr. Wagenberg's hidden cameras during an investigation of racial profiling on "Primetime Live."
A thicket of such cases in the last few years has led network news operations to rely less on clandestine taping. In a bit of a backlash, however, even some defenders of privacy rights now wonder whether existing law has done too much to hamper the legitimate search for malefactors while protecting more casual voyeurs. They cite a case in September, when the Supreme Court of Washington State overturned the voyeurism convictions of two men who had taken surreptitious photographs up women's skirts in public locations; the state voyeurism law, the court held, did not protect people at public sites.
"If the law inhibits otherwise permissible activity by news organizations but leaves peeping Toms untouched, there's a problem," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.
"Surprisingly, even Mr. Wagenberg believes that secret video has gone too far. "I definitely feel undercover has been overused," he said during a rare interview here, where he was rigging courtrooms with the nearly invisible robotics that capture real legal conflict for NBC's "Crime & Punishment." The interview took place on the condition that he not be directly photographed or described, since he often goes undercover to plant his devices.
In a world gone mad with Web cams, traffic cams and facial-recognition technology, Mr. Wagenberg, 54, has a growing list of things he will not do. He does not sell to retail "spy stores," which he calls "rip-offs" aimed at wealthy businessmen, nor to private investigators, whose purposes he can never be sure of. He dismisses voyeuristic romps like NBC's "Spy TV" as "garbage," and he has refused to work for the Fox network for more than a decade, since, he said, a pair of its producers asked him to smuggle a camera into the rehabilitation center where the rape and beating victim known as the Central Park jogger was recovering, and to tape some youths who were reported to be planning to shoot illegal immigrants near the Texas-Mexico border for weekend sport.
He is most proud of some of the work he has done for organizations that chronicle human rights abuses around the world. "I think he's fantastic," said Gillian Caldwell, executive director of Witness, a New York-based group devoted to exposing rights violations. Mr. Wagenberg has provided her organization with hidden cameras to record the Russian mafia's trade in prostitutes and endangered species and to document the oppression of Afghan women under the Taliban, among other issues.
Considered less noble is Mr. Wagenberg's role in rigging electronics for HBO's popular "Taxicab Confessions," which has traded on the secretly taped musings of love-struck strippers, drug-hungry addicts and various other lost souls riding in Las Vegas taxis. (The passengers are eventually informed of the cameras and sign releases before the film is broadcast.) Having worked on the show since 1997, Mr. Wagenberg said he he had come to terms with it as a "social experiment."
He also expressed sympathy for the three New Jersey police officers Mr. Johnson represented. "These cops, they were doing their job," he said, "that's all they were doing."
His attitude may reflect his increasing preference for law enforcement work, especially as network news operations have become more reluctant to use hidden cameras, even as the technology proliferates elsewhere. News organizations prefer to avoid lawsuits like the one brought by the Food Lion chain against ABC after "Primetime Live" broadcast a report, including a secretly made videotape, in 1992, saying that the stores sold tainted meat. (Although all but $2 of a jury award of damages was overturned on appeal, the ABC victory was costly.) Mr. Wagenberg estimates that 50 percent or more of his business now comes from rapidly growing sales to, or training of, federal, state and local law enforcement officers.
In the last year, he said, federal and state agencies have increased purchases from a catalog that includes his latest offering, an $850 so-called screw cam that is hidden behind the top of a Phillip's-head screw.
Born in Manhattan, Mr. Wagenberg dropped out of the City University of New York and signed on as a machinist for his father's garment-manufacturing business. He stumbled into the tightly knit world of undercover technology (only a few players with similarly small companies compete for this high-end business) after learning audio-visual engineering from a local military contractor and serving briefly with the United States Information Agency.
He remembers the 1980's as an anything-goes period, when news organizations spent money freely to pursue the most compelling film and video documentation. "I would go down to Bogota to do some cocaine story," he recalled, "and I'd be given six, seven thousand dollars cash in my pocket as bribe money to get where I had to go."
Some competitors, Mr. Wagenberg said, have dropped out of the business as legal pressures have mounted. But StreeTVision, operating out of a loft in the West Village, has prospered as a small family enterprise, with Mr. Wagenberg's father, Jerry, designing body harnesses and his younger brother, Eric, sharing in much of the work.
One secret to the Wagenbergs' success is a growing obsession with not just getting the shot, but also with making the work watchable, even if it's a police sting. "I was a director of photography for a while, doing what I call legitimate video," Mr. Wagenberg said. "Commercials. Fashion show stuff. There's an art to lighting someone and making them look good." He added that he had taken pains to provide infrared backlighting for clandestine videotapes of police investigations.
Bill Guttentag, a co-creator and executive producer of "Crime & Punishment," said Mr. Wagenberg's concealed cameras allowed courtroom events to unfold naturally on television, while providing shots that meshed easily with the high-definition video used elsewhere in the show. "Very quickly, people forget" about the concealed robotics, he said, adding, "Any success we have, we owe in large part to Mitchell."
Mr. Wagenberg, who is annoyed by the suggestion that his shots have become the stuff of entertainment, contends that his fundamental mission is to locate truths that would remain hidden if it were not for the concealed cameras. "How would you ever find out what goes on in those factories?" he said, referring to film his equipment once captured of children whose hands had been scalded in Indian silk plants.
"I'm going to get fussier," he said of the future. He expects demand for hidden cameras to increase as the equipment continues to shrink. He said he hoped to work more often with the watchdog groups and to sidestep the less worthy news media assignments.
"They do great stories, and they do stupid stories," he explained. "I just want to stay away from the stupid stories."
Copyright The New York Times Company