Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (31 page)

I should have been using every resource I had to find out about Eric before this, I knew. But better late than never. I called Ann, my contact at the SSA. She looked up Eric Heinz and gave me his Social Security number, birthplace, and date of birth. She also told me he was listed as receiving disability payments for a missing limb.

If his story about his motorcycle crash was true and he really was walking around on an artificial leg, the doctors must have done some great job, because I had never seen even the hint of a limp. Or maybe he wasn’t really missing a leg at all but had just found a doctor to make a phony report so he could collect benefits; that might explain how come he never seemed to go off to a job.

I told Ann, “This is a fraud case. Let’s see if we can find his parents’ names.” Eric’s driver’s license said that he was a junior, which made this step a whole lot easier. She looked up all of the people listed as Eric Heinz Sr. with a birth year in the range that I had calculated might be reasonable for Eric’s father. She found one with a birth date of June 20, 1935.

That evening, Teltec coworker Danny Yelin and I met for dinner at Solley’s delicatessen in Sherman Oaks. After we ordered, I went to the pay phone and called the number I had tracked down for Eric Heinz Sr.

What happened next maybe shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. It caught me off guard.

“I’m trying to get hold of Eric,” I said. “I’m a friend of his from high school.”

“Who is this?”
the man asked in a suspicious tone. “What’s your name again?”

“Maybe I have the wrong Eric Heinz. Is there an Eric Junior?”

“My son passed away,” he said.

He sounded annoyed, bordering on controlled anger. He said he wanted my phone number, that he would call me back—obviously planning to report me to the authorities and have me investigated. No problem: I gave him the number for the pay phone in the deli and hung up.

He called back immediately. We began our dance again, with me trying to pull him closer, him keeping me at arm’s length.

I asked, “When did he die?”

Then it came out: “My son died as an infant.”

I felt the heat of a big adrenaline rush. The explanation was obvious: “Eric Heinz” was a stolen identity.

Somehow I managed to pull myself together enough to babble something about being sorry for his loss.

So who was he really, this one-legged bullshit artist who was working with the FBI and using a phony name?

Meanwhile I felt the need to satisfy myself that what Eric Heinz Sr. had told me about his son’s dying in infancy was really true. Again with the help of my pal Ann at the Social Security Administration, I tracked down Eric Sr.’s brother, who confirmed the story: Eric Jr. had died in a
car accident in 1962, at the age of two, on his way to the Seattle World’s Fair with his mother, who was also killed in the crash.

No wonder Eric Sr. had turned so cold when I claimed his son and I had gone to high school together.

There is a particular kind of satisfaction in following a thread all the way to its end. In this case, that meant getting a copy of Eric Heinz’s death record from the King County Bureau of Vital Statistics, in Seattle. I sent a request, enclosing the nominal fee required, and asked that it be mailed to me at Teltec.

The father and the uncle had been telling me the truth. The “Eric Heinz”
I
knew was playing a familiar game of infant-identity theft.

Wow! I had finally cracked open the truth about him
.

The name “Eric Heinz” was a complete phony.

So then who the fuck
was
this guy, who was dead but trying to set me up?

Going back over my traffic analysis of FBI cell phone calls, I noticed that McGuire was making a lot of calls to 213 894-0336. I already knew that 213 894 was the area code and exchange for the phones at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.
I called the number and found it was the phone for one David Schindler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who had been the prosecutor on the Poulsen case. He’d be just the guy, I thought, who would get assigned to take on the next big Los Angeles hacker case.

So the government apparently already had a prosecutor assigned to me.
Not good!

From the time I first gained access to PacTel Cellular’s call detail records, showing an almost-up-to-the-minute log of calls both to and from every one of the company’s subscribers, I’d been checking them often—targeting the people on the white collar crime unit who were frequently in touch with Eric, focusing in particular on Special Agent McGuire.

That was how I happened to spot an attention-getting series of calls: over a span of a few minutes, McGuire had called Eric’s pager several times. And McGuire’s very next call after his last attempt was to a landline number I hadn’t seen before.

I called the number. Well, hello—I knew that voice well. The person who answered the phone was Eric. At a new landline number, in a different part of Los Angeles. He had moved
again
.

Hanging up, I had a smile on my face. Eric would know a hang-up had to be me. Probably before he had finished unpacking, I had already found out he had moved.

PacBell’s line-assignment center would be the place to get Eric’s new address.

It was 2270 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which turned out to be in a pricey neighborhood about a mile north of Hollywood Boulevard, in the Hollywood Hills, halfway up toward Mulholland Drive.

His fourth address in the several months I had known him. The reason wasn’t hard to figure: the Bureau was trying to protect him. Each time I found his new address, the Feds would move him. I had now found his address three times, and they had moved him each time.

You would think they might have figured out by then that his location was a secret they were not going to be able to keep from me.

In front of a computer in a safe location hacking by night, in front of a computer “investigating” for Teltec by day. The Teltec work mostly involved projects like figuring out where the husband in a divorce case was hiding his assets, helping an attorney decide whether or not to file a lawsuit by finding out whether the potential defendant had enough of a bankroll to make it worthwhile, and tracking down deadbeats. A few cases were gratifying, like locating a parent who had abducted his or her own child and fled to Canada, Europe, or wherever; the satisfaction I got from succeeding in those cases was enormous and left me feeling I was doing a small bit of good in the world.

But doing good deeds for society wasn’t going to earn me any Brownie points with law enforcement. I figured out how to set up an early-warning system to sound an alarm if the Feds were hanging around waiting to follow me when I left work. I bought a RadioShack scanner that had the cellular band unblocked (the FCC had started cracking down on scanner manufacturers to prevent the interception of cell phone traffic). I also bought a device called a “digital-data interpreter,” or DDI—a special box that could decode the signaling information
on the cellular network. The scanner signals fed into the DDI, which was connected to my computer.

A cell phone registers with the nearest cell tower and establishes communications with it, so that when a call comes in for you, the system knows which cell tower to relay the call to on its way to your handset. Without this arrangement, the cell phone company would have no way of getting a call routed to you. I programmed the scanner to monitor the frequency of the cell tower nearest to Teltec, so it would pick up information from the tower identifying the phone number of every cell phone in or even just passing through the area.

My scanner fed this constant flow of data to the DDI, which converted the information into separate pieces, like this:

618-1000 (213) Registration

610-2902 (714) Paging

400-8172 (818) Paging

701-1223 (310) Registration

Each line shows the status of a cell phone currently in the area served by this cell site; the first set of digits on the line is the phone number of one cell phone. “Paging” signifies that the site is receiving a call for that cell phone and is signaling the phone to establish a connection. “Registration” indicates that the phone is in the area of this cell tower and ready to make or receive calls.

I configured the DDI software package on my computer to play an alarm tone if the DDI detected any phone number that I programmed into the software: the cell phone numbers of all the FBI agents I had identified as being in communication with Eric. The software continually scanned the phone numbers being fed to it in the chain of cell site, to scanner, to DDI, to computer. If any of the agents’ cell phones showed up in the Teltec area, my setup would sound the alert.

I had created a trap for the FBI, putting me one step ahead. If the Feds came looking for me, I’d be forewarned.

O
n a Monday in late September 1992, I arrived at work early, before anyone else was in. As I walked down the hall, I started hearing a faint
beep, beep, beep
. I thought I must have incorrectly entered the alarm code for getting into the Teltec offices. But the farther I went down the hall, the louder the beeping became.

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep…

The sound was coming from my office.

Maybe somebody had stashed an electronic alarm of some sort at my desk?

No. It was something else.

My early-warning system.

The beeping had been triggered by the software package monitoring my scanner.

The scanner was picking up an FBI cell phone in the area.

Shit shit shit shit shit
.

The computer showed me the phone number of the cell phone that had triggered the alarm: 213 500-6418.

Ken McGuire’s cell phone
.

The DDI software on my computer showed that the alarm had been triggered at 6:36 a.m., a couple of hours earlier.

McGuire had been in the area, somewhere near Teltec.

My computer was also showing the digits McGuire had dialed: 818
880-9XXX. Back in those days, in Los Angeles, the “9” in that position of the phone number usually meant a pay phone. McGuire was calling a pay phone in my neighborhood.

Moments later it hit me, and it confirmed my worst fear: McGuire had called the pay phone near the Village Market, the convenience store directly across the street from my apartment.

That was only a couple of miles away from Teltec, barely more than a five-minute drive.

A thousand things were running through my mind. Why were they here? They were setting up to follow me. Or they followed me here to arrest me. Should I run? Hide? Sit and wait for them to come bursting through the door?

I was startled. Scared. Terrified.

Wait a minute. If they had come to arrest me, they would have knocked on my door while I was still in the apartment.

Why would McGuire call the Village Market? Suddenly the answer came clear: to get a search warrant, they would need a description of my apartment complex and the exact location of my unit. Maybe McGuire wasn’t ready to arrest me yet—he was just getting the location details that he needed to put into the search warrant before presenting it to a judge.

Michael and Mark both arrived at work. I updated them: “Ken McGuire’s been to my apartment this morning, while I was still asleep.” Their expressions were priceless: “How the hell does he always find out these things?!” All along, they had been fascinated by my stories about how I was penetrating the entire FBI operation against me. They had been eating it up, and this was the capper.

I gathered up all my personal belongings and headed down the stairs to my car, freaked out and uncomfortable, afraid at any moment I’d hear someone shout:
“Mitnick, FREEZE!”
In the parking area, I peered intently into every car to see if there were any guys in suits keeping watch for me.

As I cautiously pulled out of the garage, my eyes were all but glued to the rearview mirror. I was concentrating more on what might be behind me than what was in front.

I jumped onto the 101 Freeway and gunned it to Aguora Hills, one city over, far enough away that I would be comfortable using my cell phone.

Rolling off the freeway, I pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot.

My first call was, naturally, to Lewis. “The Feds are coming,” I told him.

Most everything washed off Lewis. The shell of arrogance was usually impenetrable.

Not this time. I could hear the news had made him uncomfortable, nervous. If the Feds were targeting me, they had to know he’d been involved in my hacking. It was almost a dead certainty that they wouldn’t want just Mitnick.

I went back to my apartment and went through it thoroughly, inch by inch, rounding up everything I had accumulated since the last cleanup that might help make a case against me. Papers, disks, scraps of anything with writing on it. And the same with my car.