Steven Tullberg, a law student at Columbia University, said he was baffled when the New York Bar Association's Committee on Character and Fitness questioned him in February 1971 about his membership in the Coalition for an Anti-Imperialist Movement - a group he had never heard of. The allegation was leaked from his secret NYPD file, the lawsuit alleged.
"I was stunned," says Tullberg, now living in Maryland. "You're getting on with your life, and then you get hit by something like this."
The leftists argued that police surveillance was so oppressive that it was threatening free speech.
One NYPD informant joined Veterans and Reservists Against the War in Vietnam, known as V&R, and began urging group members to break the law during demonstrations. Detectives visited the homes of two members and warned one that he should drop out of the group.
The infiltration "created such fear among the members of V&R, and so chilled their interest in the exercise of their rights of free expression and association, that V&R disbanded as a group shortly thereafter," the Handschu lawsuit alleged.
"They had so much going on, so much surveillance of us," says Keith Lampe, a Korean war veteran and one of the group's organizers.
In 1985 the police and plaintiffs reached a settlement: The NYPD agreed to a set of surveillance rules and oversight by a three-member panel. In return, Handschu and the others dropped their lawsuit.
"We thought we had accomplished something," Handschu said. "Everybody felt like it was a good thing we had been able to do."
The Handschu Guidelines, as the rules were known, barred police from starting a surveillance file purely because of the religion or political leanings of a person or group. It also required detectives to have "specific information" about a future crime and barred them from keeping notes on political or religious activities.
The lawsuit was declared closed. The court files were packed into boxes and sent to a vault deep inside a former mine in Lee's Summit, Mo.
Then came the attacks on the World Trade Center.
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