Under New York Code of Criminal Procedure § 813-a, police obtained an ex parte order to bug the office of attorney Ralph Berger.

The statute allowed electronic eavesdropping for up to two months upon a standard of "a reasonable ground to believe that evidence of a crime may be thus obtained."

Finally, the statute did not require a return on the warrant, so law enforcement officers did not have to account to a judge for their use of evidence gathered.

This holding predates by several months the more famous case of Katz v. United States, which extended Fourth Amendment protection to a conversation in a public phone booth based on the speaker's reasonable expectation of privacy.

Academic Colin Agur argues that Berger, along with Katz v. United States, were responses by the Court to police and government abuse of telephone surveillance.