Yet on February 23, a confidential informant filed a contradictory report. An “unnamed person” who had engaged in “numerous conversations with John Lennon and his wife about becoming active in the New Left movement in the United States” noted that “Lennon and his wife seem uninterested…Lennon and his wife are passé about United States politics.”

Wilde places a call to the district director of immigration, who confirms the lawyer’s suspicions. “The situation in Washington vis-à-vis your clients is not a healthy one,” the official says. “They will not be given any further extensions and I suggest you tell them to get the hell out.”

Get the hell out is what John and Yoko would like to say to the people they keep seeing outside their apartment. Though one February FBI report mangled their home address as “St. Regis Hotel, 150 Bank Street” (they’d left the hotel for their 105 Bank Street apartment four months earlier), they’re nevertheless subject to ongoing observation by “large men in glasses across the street” and “an agent behind every mail box.” It seems so over the top that when John first complained to his journalist friend Ray Connolly that his phones were being tapped, Connolly brushed it off. “I thought he was being paranoid. He sometimes was, but not this time,” Connolly later wrote.

When the couple complains to Wildes about “two guys interminably fixing a bike, a broken bike across the street” as well as “two guys in a car” following their driver, the lawyer can only surmise that the FBI was being so blatant on purpose because they “wanted them to feel that they were under surveillance.”

John agrees, saying as much when he appears on The Dick Cavett Show.

“I felt followed everywhere by government agents,” John tells the host. “Every time I picked up the phone, there was a lot of noise…I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in the car and they’d be following me and not hiding…They wanted me to see that I was being followed…”

Wildes, who regards John as “a guy of major principle,” relates that his client “understood that what was being done to him was wrong. It was an abuse of the law, and he was willing to stand up and try to shine the big light on it.” It was a case of the government abusing power, of “the Nixon administration [making] life intolerable for John Lennon and Yoko Ono.” Never, Wildes later says, had he seen “the government so determined to remove anyone from the United States.”