New Orleans ? Four days before James O’Keefe was charged in a plot to tamper with the office phones of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, the conservative activist promised his audience at a luncheon they would be hearing about a project he was working on in New Orleans.

O’Keefe wouldn’t elaborate on the nature of his plans, according to people who heard his speech at the luncheon conducted by the conservative Pelican Institute last Thursday in New Orleans.

“He just sort of alluded to the fact that we would all find out real soon. And we did,” said Audra Shay, a Mandeville resident and chairwoman of the Young Republican National Federation.

Democrats are calling it “Louisiana Watergate,” but neither the FBI nor federal prosecutors are saying what O’Keefe and three other young conservative activists were up to when they were arrested Monday.

Authorities said two of the defendants posed as telephone repairmen in hard hats, fluorescent vests and tool belts and asked to see the phones at Landrieu’s office; one of them had a tiny camera in his helmet. A third man is alleged to have waited outside in a car with a listening device to pick up transmissions. O’Keefe used his cell phone to try to capture video of the scene inside, authorities said.