Investigations: the scary circus.

Strange things started happening to Jeff Steins 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 long-time 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 shadow 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."