Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (18 page)

We talked for about ten minutes. Over the next week or so, I called Spiegel a few more times for conversations with Eric.

A couple of things nagged at my gut. Eric didn’t talk like other hackers; he sounded more like Joe Friday, like a cop. He asked questions like, “What projects have you been up to lately? Who are you talking with these days?”

Asking a hacker that kind of stuff was a little like going into a bar where bank robbers hung out and saying to one of them, “Ernie sent me. Who’d you pull your last job with?”

I told him, “I’m not hacking anymore.”

“Neither am I,” he said.

This was pretty much the standard cover-your-ass line with somebody you didn’t know. Of course he was lying, and he meant for me to
know it. He must have figured I was lying, too. In my case, the statement was pretty much true. But, thanks to this guy, it wouldn’t be for long.

I told him, “There’s a friend of mine I think you’d like to talk to. His name is Bob. What number should I have him call you at?”

“Tell him to call Henry the same way you just did,” he said. “He’ll conference me in again.”

“Bob” was my on-the-spur-of-the-moment alias for Lewis De Payne.

It would have been hard to find another hacker with Eric’s inside information. Yes, I was drawing Lewis even deeper into my hacking, but with him acting as my front guy, I could find out what information Eric had that Lewis and I didn’t, while still protecting myself.

Why was I willing to be tempted into exchanging information with Eric, when for me to even talk with him violated my terms of release? Think of it like this: I was living in Las Vegas, a city I didn’t know well and didn’t much like. I kept driving past the gaudy hotels and casinos, all tarted up to draw the tourists and gamblers. For me this was no fun-town. There was no sunshine in my life, none of the thrill and intellectual challenge I’d experienced when hacking into the phone companies. None of that adrenaline flow from finding software flaws that would let me electronically march right into a company’s network—the rush I’d felt back in the days when I was known in the online underworld as “Condor,” my hacker handle. (I had originally chosen that name out of admiration for a character who was a particular hero of mine, the one-step-ahead-of-everybody guy played by Robert Redford in the movie
Three Days of the Condor
.)

And now the Probation Department had assigned me a new Probation Officer, somebody who seemed to think I had gotten too many breaks and needed to be taught some lessons. He had called up a company that was in the process of hiring me and asked questions like “Will Kevin have access to company funds?” even though I had never made a penny from hacking, despite how easy it would have been. That pissed me off.

I got the job anyway. But every day, before I left, they searched me for external media like floppy disks and mag tapes. Just me, nobody else. I hated that.

After five months, I completed a huge programming assignment and was laid off. I wasn’t sorry to leave.

But finding a new job proved a challenge, since the same Probation Officer kept calling every prospective employer and asking those alarming questions of his: “Will he have access to any financial information?” and so on.

That left me depressed as well as unemployed.

The two or three hours a day that I spent at the gym stretched my muscles but not my mind. I signed up for a computer programming class and a nutrition class (because I was trying to learn more about living a healthy lifestyle) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In my first week there, I powered the workstation off and on while constantly typing “Control-C,” which broke the computer out of its boot-up script and gave me administrative privileges, or “root.” Minutes later an administrator came
running
into the room, shouting,
“What are you doing?!”

I smiled at him. “I found a bug. And look, I got root.”

He ordered me out and told my Probation Officer I had been on the Internet, which wasn’t true but gave them enough of an excuse to force me to pack up and drop out of all programming classes.

Years later I would learn that a system admin at the university had sent a message to a guy by the name of Tsutomu Shimomura under the subject line “About our friend,” describing this incident. Shimomura figures heavily in the final chapters of this story, but I was stunned when I discovered that he had been snooping into what I was up to as early as this, at a time when we had had no contact and I didn’t even know he existed.

Though booted from the programming course at UNLV, I aced the nutrition class, then switched to Clark County Community College, where tuition was cheaper for residents. This time I took courses in advanced electronics, as well as a writing course.

Classes might have been more of an attraction if the girl students had been pretty enough or lively enough to get my juices flowing a little faster, but this was community college night school. If I wanted to meet more showgirls, it wasn’t going to be in a classroom at night.

When depressed, I turn to things that give me pleasure. Doesn’t everyone?

With Eric, something interesting had dropped into my lap. Something
that might offer a much greater test of my abilities. Something that might get my adrenaline pumping again.

The hard truth is that there wouldn’t be any story to write if I hadn’t overcome my unhappiness about Lewis and filled him in on my conversation with Eric. He was all for it, eager to sound out this guy and see if he seemed to be on the level.

Lewis phoned me back the next day to say that he had contacted Spiegel and talked to Eric. He seemed surprised to admit he had liked the guy.

Even more, he agreed with me that Eric, as he put it, “seems to know a lot of stuff about Pacific Bell’s internal processes and switches. He could be a valuable resource.” Lewis thought we ought to get together with him.

I was about to play the first move of what would turn into an elaborate cat-and-mouse game—one that would put me at high risk and demand every ounce of my ingenuity.

E
arly in January 1992, my father called from Los Angeles to say he was worried about my half-brother, Adam, his only other child. I had always been envious of Adam’s relationship with our father, since I had seen my dad only intermittently in the first years of my growing up.

Adam had been living with our dad in Calabasas, near Los Angeles, while he took a prelaw program at Pierce College. He hadn’t come home the night before, which my father said wasn’t like him. I tried to offer reassurance, but what could I say when I really didn’t know anything about the situation?

Dad’s concern turned out to be appropriate. For several miserable days, he was beside himself at hearing no word from Adam. I tried to console and reassure him while I made anxious calls to Uncle Mitchell and Adam’s friend Kent and paged Adam himself over and over and over.

A few days later my dad called, sobbing and distraught. He had just gotten a phone call from the police. They had found Adam, in the passenger seat of his car, parked at a major druggie hangout, Echo Park. He was dead of a drug overdose.

Though Adam and I had grown up separately, in different cities except for a short period when we both lived with our father in Atlanta, in the last couple of years we had grown very close, half-brothers who had
become closer than many blood brothers. When I had first started getting to know him in Los Angeles, I couldn’t stand any of the music he cared about—rap and hip-hop, anything by 2 Live Crew, Dr. Dre, or N.W.A. But the more of it I heard when we were together, the more it grew on me, and music became part of the bond that drew us to each other.

And now he was gone.

My father and I had had an up-and-down relationship, but I felt he needed me now. I got in touch with my Probation Officer and gained permission to return to LA for a time to help my dad cope with Adam’s death and work his way out of the depression he seemed to be in, even though I knew that this would heighten my own sadness. A day later I was in my car, heading west on I-15 out of the desert for the five-hour pull to Los Angeles.

The drive gave me time to think. Adam’s death just didn’t seem to make sense. Like a lot of kids, he had gone through a rebellious period. At one point he had dressed to emulate his favorite “Goth” bands and was really embarrassing to even be seen with in public. He wasn’t getting along with our dad at all then, and had moved in with my mom and me for a while. But more recently, in college, he seemed to have found himself. Even if he used drugs recreationally, it just didn’t make sense to me that he would have overdosed. I had seen him recently, and there hadn’t been anything in his behavior that even hinted at his being an addict. And my dad had told me that the cops hadn’t found any needle marks when they discovered Adam’s body.

Driving into the night to join my father, I began to think about whether I might be able to use my hacking skills to find out who Adam had been with that night and where he had been.

Late in the evening after the dull drive from Las Vegas, I pulled up at my dad’s apartment on Las Virgenes Road in the town of Calabasas, about forty-five minutes up the coast from Santa Monica and a dozen miles inland from the ocean. I found him absolutely devastated about Adam, harboring a suspicion of foul play. The normal routine of Dad’s life—running his general contracting business, watching the TV news, reading the newspaper over breakfast, taking trips to the Channel Islands to go boating, going to occasional synagogue services—was torn apart. I knew my moving in with him would pose challenges—he was
never an easy man to deal with—but I wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. He needed me.

When he opened the door to greet me, I was shocked by how distraught he looked, how gray his face was. He was an emotional wreck. Balding now, clean-shaven and of medium build, he seemed suddenly shrunken.

The cops had already told him, “This isn’t the kind of case we investigate.”

But they had found that Adam’s shoes were tied as if by a person facing him, not the way he would have tied them by himself. And closer examination had revealed one needle puncture in his right arm, which would make sense only if someone else had given him the fatal dose: he was right-handed, so it would have been entirely unnatural for him to inject himself using his left hand. It was clear he had been with someone else when he died—someone who had given him the fatal hit, either bad dope or way too much, then dumped his body in his car, driven it to a seedy, drug-infested part of Los Angeles, and split.

If the cops weren’t going to do anything, I would have to be the vigilante investigator.

I took over Adam’s old room and dived into researching the phone company records. My best guesses were the two people I had been calling when I first heard from Dad: Adam’s closest friend, Kent, whom he was supposed to be with on his last weekend; and, unhappily, my uncle Mitchell, who had already destroyed his own life with dope. Adam had become very close to Uncle Mitchell. My dad had a hunch that Mitchell had played a role in Adam’s death, maybe even been responsible for it.

At the funeral, the viewing took place in a separate room. I went in alone and found Adam laid out in an open coffin. Being at the funeral of someone close to me was a new and emotionally difficult experience. I remember how different he looked—unrecognizable. I just kept hoping that I was trapped in some sort of cruel nightmare. I was alone in a room with my only brother, and I would never again be able to speak with him. It’s a cliché, I know, but my sadness made me realize how little time we really have in this life.

One of my first tasks in LA was to contact the Probation Officer to whom my case had been transferred, Frank Gulla. Late fortyish, with a
medium build and a friendly, calm personality, he was even relaxed about the rules—for example, not insisting on our “required” monthly visits after he got to know me. When I would finally get around to showing up at his office, he’d have me fill out the monthly reports that I had missed, and we’d backdate them. I don’t suppose he was that lax with guys charged with more serious crimes, but I appreciated his being so casual with me.

I threw myself into the investigation. Dad and I both suspected Adam’s friend Kent knew more than he was telling us. Was he perhaps relieving his conscience by opening up to other people? If so, was he careless enough to do it over the telephone? With my friend Alex, I drove to Long Beach, where Kent lived. After a little snooping at a nearby apartment complex, I found what I needed: a phone line not currently wired to the phone of any customer. One call to the local CO was all it took to get a tech to “punch down” a connection from Kent’s line to the unused phone line, turning it, in effect, into a secret extension of his phone. Alex and I set up a voice-activated tape recorder inside the phone company’s terminal box to capture every word spoken on both ends of Kent’s calls.

For the next several days, I made the hour-and-a-half trek from my dad’s place to the apartment building with the hidden recorder in Long Beach. Each time I’d retrieve the previous day’s tape, replace it with a fresh one, and pop the microcassette into my portable tape player to listen to Kent’s conversations as I drove back to Dad’s. In vain. Hours and hours of effort, and nothing to show for it.