Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (32 page)

That evening I knocked on Mark Kasden’s door and asked if I could store the stuff in his closet along with the earlier stash I had left with him.

I returned to my apartment and moved my computer back once more to my father’s friend’s place, where I had hidden it once before.

When I was finished, I was satisfied I was thoroughly clean.

I booked into a small motel just down the street, afraid to stay in my own apartment. I didn’t sleep very well and was awake early, tossing and turning.

Tuesday morning I drove to work feeling like a character in a bad spy movie: Any helicopters? Crown Victorias? Suspicious-looking guys in suits and short haircuts?

Nothing.

I felt the other shoe could drop at any moment.

But the day went by peacefully. I actually managed to get some work done.

Driving home, I stopped by a doughnut shop and bought a dozen assorted. On the door of the fridge, I Scotch-taped a note: “FBI doughnuts.”

On the box, in large letters, I wrote:

I hoped they’d be
really
upset that I’d known not only
that
I was going to be raided, but exactly
when
.

The next morning, September 30, 1992, now back in my own apartment, I was sleeping fitfully, feeling nervous and jumpy, never quite entirely asleep.

Around 6:00 a.m., I woke up, alarmed. Someone was jiggling a key in my apartment door. I was expecting the Feds, but they don’t use a key, they pound. Was this somebody trying to break in? I shouted,
“Who’s there?”
hoping to scare the intruder away.

“FBI—open up!”

I thought,
This is it. I’m going back to jail
.

Even though I had known they were coming, I wasn’t emotionally prepared. How could I be? I was petrified of getting arrested.

I answered the door, not even realizing I was stark naked. At the front of the pack was a lady agent, who couldn’t keep herself from glancing down.

Then a whole team stepped into view and pushed their way into the room. They shook down the place while I got dressed, even thoroughly inspecting the contents of the fridge. No one commented or cracked a smile at my “FBI doughnuts” sign, and the entire dozen went untouched.

But I had done a good cleanup job. They didn’t find anything incriminating in the fridge, and they didn’t find anything anywhere else that would help their case.

Of course they didn’t like that, and they didn’t like my naive, playing-dumb attitude.

One agent sat down at the kitchen table and said, “Come over here, let’s talk.” FBI agents are generally very polite, and this guy and I knew each other. He was Special Agent Richard Beasley, an agent who had been involved in my DEC case. He said in a friendly tone and with what sounded like a Texas drawl, “Kevin, this is your second time around. We’re searching De Payne right now. He’s cooperating. Unless you cooperate, you’re going to be sitting on the back of the bus.”

I had never heard the expression before, but the meaning was clear: the first guy to roll over on the other one gets a much better deal. Lewis and I had talked about this many times. “What would you do if the police questioned you?” one of us would ask the other.

The answer always was, “Tell them to talk to my lawyer.”

I wasn’t going to rat on him, and I knew he’d be a stand-up guy for me, as well.

Beasley pulled out a tape cassette. He asked me, “Do you have a cassette player?”

“No!”

I couldn’t figure this. The agency that likes to think it’s the best law enforcement agency in the United States, if not the world, comes with a cassette tape they want me to listen to but nobody thinks to bring along a player?

One of the other agents spotted my large boom box and brought it over. Beasley put in the cassette and punched Play.

I heard a call being dialed and Mark Kasden talking in the background. Then my voice. It sounded like Mark and I were talking in the same room. I could hear the ringing sound after the digits were dialed.

The next voice to spill out of the boom box said something like, “Welcome to Pacific Bell voicemail. Please enter your mailbox number.”

More digits being dialed.

“Please enter your password.”

“You have three new messages.”

And then, “Hi, Darrell, this is David Simon. Please call me at 818 783-42XX.”

Then another call. My voice again, saying, “Hey, Detective Simon just called Santos.”

Beasley shut off the tape player.

“What do you have to say?” he challenged.

I’m afraid I sneered at him. “It’s amazing what the FBI can do with technology.”

I said it arrogantly, looking him straight in the eye.

Another agent who’d been standing next to us throughout this exchange reached over, grabbed the boom box, and yanked the cassette door right off. Like a four-year-old having a temper tantrum.

The agents fanned out to search. I sat at the table watching.

Another agent arrived. He handed me his card, which said “Supervisory Special Agent.” He opened a large loose-leaf notebook he had brought and started jotting notes. After a few moments, he looked up and asked, “Where’s his computer?”

“We didn’t find one,” he was told.

He looked annoyed.

They kept searching.

Finally I asked the agent in charge, “Am I under arrest?”

“No,” he said.

Whaaaat?!?!?
Not under arrest?! I couldn’t believe it. That made no sense. But he wasn’t toying with me. None of the other agents even flinched. It must be true. Let’s test this:

“If I’m not under arrest, I’m leaving,” I said.

“Where to?” the supervisory agent asked.

“To my dad’s, to ask him if I should cooperate.”
Cooperate—
yeah, sure. But whatever I needed to say so I could get out of there, to someplace I could feel comfortable.

The agent thought about it for a moment. If I wasn’t being arrested, what was the point of making me stay there watching them ransack my apartment?

“Okay,” he said.

They frisked me, found my wallet, and searched it. They found nothing interesting inside. And they let me walk out.

Three agents followed me to my car. After I unlocked it, they started to search. Shit!—they found a box of floppies I had overlooked in the glove box. I was dismayed and worried. They were delighted.

When they had finished searching my car, they opened the doors and got in, sitting there like we were best friends going on an outing together. I was shocked.

I said, “What are you guys doing in my car?!”

“We’re going with you to your dad’s.”

“No, you’re not. Get out of my car!”

And whaddaya know? They did.

They got into two FBI cars and followed me for the drive to where my father was then living, with a new girlfriend I didn’t much like.

When we got to my dad’s house, they said they wanted to go in with me. I told them they couldn’t, that I wanted to have a discussion with him alone.

They didn’t leave, just got back into their cars and sat while I went inside.

I hadn’t finished my cleanup at Teltec and needed to get back there without an FBI surveillance team. When I looked out, they were still
sitting there. I went out and told them my dad and I had decided I was going to consult an attorney before speaking with them. I was trying to give them a glimmer of hope that I might cooperate, even though I had no intention of doing so.

They finally left.

As soon as they were out of sight, I hustled to my car and sped to Teltec.

And why didn’t I get to meet Agent Ken McGuire or Pacific Bell’s Terry Atchley on that fateful day? They had gone to De Payne’s, hoping to get him to flip on me, rat me out.

Lewis offered to do exactly that. I’ve read the FBI report of the conversation: Lewis keeps offering to talk, but keeps asking for assurances. And he keeps saying that I’m dangerous and he’s afraid of me.

So I hadn’t been arrested, and I knew the agents wouldn’t find anything incriminating in my apartment. My guess was that they were looking for something more serious than cavorting with Lewis to charge me with.

At the time I still didn’t know that Teltec had been raided months earlier, so I had no reason to think the Feds might be shaking down Kasden’s apartment at the same time they were searching mine. But that was exactly what they were doing, apparently having figured that my hacking might be tied in somehow with Teltec’s illegal activities—accessing TRW with stolen merchant credentials, and so on. So much for my bright idea that I could safely stash my disks and notes at Mark’s.

But time might be on my side. My supervised release from my conviction for hacking into DEC with Lenny DiCicco was due to expire in less than three months. If the Feds hadn’t shown up with an arrest warrant by then, I would be scot-free.

The computer I was using at Teltec didn’t have any encryption tools on it, and I had to make sure the agents didn’t get anything more on me.

I pulled up at Teltec and dashed up the stairs. Fantastic—no team of Federal agents at work. Unbelievable!

I sat down at the computer in my office and gave the commands for erasing all data. In case you don’t already know this (it’s been in the news from time to time, perhaps most notably when White House staffer Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s cover-up attempt over the
Iran-Contra affair got tripped up), simply giving “Delete” commands doesn’t truly erase data from a computer’s hard drive. Instead, it just changes the name of each file to simply mark it as having been deleted; those items no longer show up in searches, but they’re still stored on the drive, and they can be recovered.

So instead of just giving Delete commands, I used a program called “WipeInfo,” part of the Norton Utilities suite. WipeInfo is designed not just to mark files as deleted but to write over them several times so they can no longer be recovered. When the program was done, there was no way a single file of mine could have been recovered from that drive.

I called my Teltec boss Michael Grant and told him about the raid. He wanted to know, “Where are you now?”

“I’m at the office.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m wiping my computer clean.”

He was furious and tried to order me to stop. Incredible. I had thought we were a team; I had thought he and his father would be on my side. Instead he was trying to talk me into leaving the evidence on my computer. It sounded like the Teltec bosses might be hoping to slime their way out of the trouble they were in by helping the Feds build a case against me.

In fact, one of my fellow employees at Teltec—another investigator who had become a buddy of mine—later confirmed that this was exactly what Michael Grant tried to do shortly after that: make a deal with the Feds to go easy on him and his dad in exchange for their testifying against me.

I was sad and disappointed when my suspicions were confirmed. I had thought Michael Grant was my friend. I never gave evidence against anyone, even though I could have made deals that would have greatly benefited me.

I guess when your friends are people who are breaking the law, you’re naive if you expect loyalty.

A couple of days later, Michael Grant told me I was through at Teltec. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

B
y November I was still jobless but was making a little money doing stuff for Teltec’s former employee Danny Yelin, who had some outside assignments he was feeding to me. Things like finding people for car repossessions: I would track them through the public utilities and the Welfare Department.

Meanwhile I was sitting on a time bomb: the Feds would be poring over all the stuff of mine they had picked up from Mark’s apartment, plus whatever they had grabbed from Lewis’s, and might find grounds for sending me back to jail.

What should I do?

Well, for the moment, I thought it would be comforting to be with my mom and Gram for Thanksgiving, so I called my Probation Officer, Frank Gulla, and asked for permission, half expecting to be turned down. Surprisingly, he granted the permission, so long as I returned by December 4.

I would later learn that back on November 6, the Probation Department had written to the court asking for a bench warrant for my arrest, citing my accessing of a Pacific Bell security agent’s voicemail and my associating with Lewis De Payne. The bench warrant was issued the next day, setting bail at $25,000.

So why did Gulla give me permission to leave town, instead of telling
me I needed to come in and see him? I haven’t figured that out to this day.

When you’re on Federal parole, probation, or supervised release, you need to check in with the local Probation Department whenever you travel to a different Federal district. The morning after I arrived in Las Vegas, I headed downtown to the Bonneville Avenue office to check in.