Gordon Carrera

Yeah, and I think it's that fact of having a kind of an established location being wired and then being used for collection intelligence, collection of blackmail, again, has a kind of historical precedent.

I mean, the most interesting one came to my mind was something actually that the Nazis ran in the late 30s, early 40s, which was known as Salon Kitty.

And this was a high class brothel in this case, which the Nazi secret service used to entrap foreign diplomats and their own elite.

And it was run by this, it's a really interesting story.

It's run by a woman called Kitty Schmidt, Katharina Schmidt, who'd worked as a governess and a piano teacher and briefly lived in England, and then ends up running a brothel in Berlin.

And then once the Nazis take over and they're kind of aggressively trying to clamp down on immoral activity, as they would put it, she realizes she's in trouble.

She's trying to get some of the money smuggled out to England by some of the girls, but then she gets arrested by the Gestapo and made an offer she can't refuse, who tells her basically, you're going to keep running this brothel, but you're going to run it as an intelligence gathering operation for the Nazis.

And it was run out of a four-story building on a quiet residential street in quite a fancy quarter of Berlin.

You can see almost a parallel there, can't you, to Epstein's Manhattan House, this place where people would go.

Technically, it was a boarding house, discreet, luxurious place, chandeliers, silk, grand piano.

German elites, foreign diplomats, all entertained there by women and lots of booze.

But it's thought that maybe as many as 50 microphones were installed throughout the property.

in the bedrooms and in these salons, concealed in chandeliers, behind headboards, in the upholstery of the armchairs.

And all of that led into a cellar where technicians worked in shifts to record everything on wax discs.

And there were just tons of conversations.

that they were recording.

Most of it, it seems to be, was gathering intelligence about what people were saying, rather than necessarily compromising with the fact that they'd gone to this brothel.

I think it was pretty successful in its own way as an intelligence operation.

It is.

Yeah, you get people like the son-in-law of Mussolini, the Italian leader, who's also the Italian foreign minister, who kind of comes in and speaks and is quite critical of Hitler.