I saw the box first. A scuffed, grey box. Bodoni Bold lettering in blue: Beretta Pistola Automatica. You couldn't miss it. Were they making sure I saw it? The man arrived...late, with a leather briefcase. He opended it. He took out a small stubby, cold-black pistol. He emptied fat, brassy bullets into his hand and stood them, affectionately on his desk. What's he been trying to prove with a loaded pistol? I thought.

"What have you been doing with a loaded pistol," I asked. "Just a job. Nothing to do with why you're here," he answered, and put the Beretta into the grey box. He handed it to his Operations Manager, Ron Hagen, who had on a grey suit and looked meek and mild mannered.

The man with the Beretta, Frank Monte, doesn't bother appearing meek and mild. He likes being a private investigator, security consultant, saboteur, recruiter of mercenary soldiers, infiltrator and super snoop, and he likes talking about it. He has an office and school for private investigators in Sydney's Australia Square. Decorating the wall is a pair of daggers. A skull carved out of wood grins from the bookcase. Hanging on a peg, a wooden baton; and flung on the windowsill, a holster.

He himself glitters and clanks with gold jewellery and an enormous diamond and emerald gold ring. "You're lucky you got me," he says. "I'm leaving for New York at three. I'm the only top professional in town. All the others do is hire stupid people as armed guards who walk around and put cards under doors."

Monte is an ex-law student, ex cop, and now a man who would warm Ayn Rand's heart. Providing, of course, it could be found. Most of his bread and butter work (and he does it all for money, he says. "I'm not here to help society.") is insurance and compensation investigation, shadowing and checking up on people who might have put in false claims.

But he's also recruited mercenaries for an oil-rich sheik, body-guarded Neil Diamond and, he says, snooped and eavesdropped and infiltrated his way around much of Sydney and Melbourne's big business for more than 10 years.

One of the problems about talking with private investigators about industrial espionage and electronic surveillance is that it suits them to stir up as much paranoia and anxiety as they can. It's good for business. But there does seem little doubt that there is something of a boom in keeping improper, if not necessarily illicit, eye and ear on what your competitors are up to. (In America it's huge. As long ago as May 1965, there were 10,000 telephones being tapped in Miami, Florida, according to news reports.)

Here it's impossible to get hard facts on the number of bugs in use (they're illegal unless the Police Commissioner authorises them for official work) but there are other indicators.

The special products branch of Telecom has, for example, 80 "Speech Inverters" (Scramblers) leased in NSW alone, and there's such a waiting list that they are now manufacturing them in Australia to begin supplying the demand by November this year. Their scrambler costs $72 a year. It is only one of many kinds on the market, though Telecom has to approve the use of all of them. You would need a computer to de-code the more sophisticated ones illicitly-but it's being done.

While it's not so hard to get information on anti-bugging devices, the authorities are either ignorant or keeping mum about the extent of bugging itself. Telecom, though it has a department investigating that sort of thing, refers you rather brusquely to the Attorney General's Department. At the Attorney General's office they tell you they don't have anything to do with telephone bugs. That's Federal Law. But they do administer the Listening Devices Act and there's been very little activity. No prosecutions for years. Using bugs is illegal, and so is advertising their sale. But possessing them and selling them is not Frank Monte stresses