Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (34 page)

And again. And still no answer. Shit! Why wasn’t she picking up? I was afraid she might’ve gone into Kinko’s looking for me, maybe even asked the clerks or other customers if they’d seen me. Damn! I had to get hold of her.

Time for a Plan B. I called the supermarket and told the person who answered that my elderly grandmother was parked in the handicapped spot right outside the market. “I was supposed to meet her,” I explained, “but I’m stuck in traffic. Could someone please go out and bring her to the phone? I’m worried about her health.”

I paced back and forth, waiting and waiting. Finally the man I’d spoken to got back on the phone and said he hadn’t been able to find her. Oh,
fuck!
Had she ventured inside Kinko’s? I was going out of my mind wondering what could be happening.

At last I managed to track down my cousin Trudy and tell her what was going on. After yelling at me, she drove to the parking lot and searched up and down the rows until she found Gram’s car—not in front of the supermarket but outside Kinko’s. My sixty-six-year-old gray-haired grandmother was still sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for me.

The two of them joined me at a nearby Dupar’s restaurant, which I had made my way to on foot, feeling sick over Gram’s having had to sit in her car for what by now was about three hours. When they walked in the door, I was hugely relieved to see that she was okay.

“I kept calling you—why didn’t you answer the phone?” I asked.

“I heard it ringing, but I don’t know how to use a cell phone,” she answered.

Incredible! It had never crossed my mind that a cell phone might be a mystery to her.

After about an hour of waiting, she said, she had gone into the Kinko’s. It was obvious that something was going on, something that looked to her like police activity. One lady was holding a plastic bag with a videotape in it. When I asked what she looked like, Gram described the lady DMV agent who had chased me.

In the normal course of my hacking, I never felt guilty about getting information I wasn’t supposed to have or talking company employees into giving me highly sensitive, proprietary information. But when I thought about my grandmother, who had done so much for me and cared so much for me all my life, sitting there in her car for so long, waiting and anxious, I was filled with remorse.

And the videotape she mentioned? You may never have noticed this, but every Kinko’s has security cameras that record a constant video stream onto a videotape loop that can hold something like twenty-four hours’ worth of data. That video no doubt contained more than a few clear images of me.

Those by themselves wouldn’t help the DMV agents attach a name to the person they were now looking for, but something else would. The fax sheets I had thrown into the air were turned over to a crime lab, which succeeded in lifting prints from the papers. Soon enough they had a name: Kevin Mitnick.

When agents at the FBI put together a “six-pack”—a set of six photos, one of me and five of other random guys—DMV Inspector Shirley Lessiak, my pursuer, had no trouble picking me out as the person she had chased.

I had outrun Lessiak and her colleagues, but in another sense I would continue running. I was now “on the run”—starting my new life as a fugitive.

S
o I was now on the run, a fugitive. Given what Deputy Marshal Salt had told my mother—that he had a warrant for my arrest—it seemed like the only choice I had.

Yet David Schindler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to my case, would confide to me years later that he was surprised to learn I had taken off. What could he have been thinking? Eric had told the FBI that I was associating with Lewis, thus violating the terms of my supervised release, and I was sure he must also have reported that I had obtained full access to SAS and had probably been using it to wiretap people. PacBell Security had found out I was intercepting the voicemail of at least one of its agents: that was another new charge that could be filed against me. And Lewis had been blabbing and bragging to Eric about other hacking the two of us had been doing.

Gram did the driving on the five-hour haul to Vegas; I hadn’t driven at all since finding out that the Feds had a warrant out for my arrest. It wasn’t exactly a joyful trip. How could it be?

Reaching town after dark, she dropped me off at the Budget Harbor Suites, where a friend of ours had kindly booked me a room in his own name.

My first task would be to build a new identity for myself and then disappear—even though it meant leaving behind friends and family
and the life I had been enjoying. My goal was to erase the past and make a fresh start toward a different kind of future.

So how did I know how to go about creating a new identity? If you remember my favorite reading material at the Survival Bookstore, where I spent so many days hanging out as a kid, you already know the answer. That book
The Paper Trip
I had soaked up years before had explained the exact steps for obtaining a new identity. I used the same principles but approached the task differently: I needed a workable, temporary new persona immediately; once I had relocated, I could take my time in creating a second, permanent identity that I would live under for the rest of my life.

On a pretext call to the Oregon DMV, claiming to be a Postal Inspector, I asked the clerk to run a search for anyone named Eric Weiss who had been born between 1958 and 1968—a ten-year period bracketing my real birth year, 1963. I was looking for someone roughly my same age, but the younger, the better. I would be applying for a new driver’s license and Social Security card, and the older my new birth certificate said I was, the more eyebrows my application would be likely to raise: How could a person in his thirties, say, never have needed a Social Security number?

The DMV lady found a few matches, but only one fit my criteria. The Eric Weiss I chose was born in 1968, making him about five years younger than I was.

Why “Eric Weiss”? That was the real name (though a number of sources also spell it “Erich Weiss” or “Erik Weisz”) of the man the world knows better as Harry Houdini. Picking it was a bit of hero worship on my part, a holdover from my early fascination with magic. As long as I was changing my name, why not pay homage to my childhood idol?

I called directory assistance and found that “my” Eric Weiss had a listed number. I called, he answered, and I asked, “Are you the same Eric Weiss who went to PSU?”

He said, “No, I graduated from Ellensburg.”

The Eric Weiss whose identity I would use had a degree in Business Administration from Central Washington University, in the town of Ellensburg. So that was what I would list on my résumé.

My letter to the Oregon Bureau of Vital Statistics was entirely routine. It purported to come from the real Eric Weiss, listed his real place
and date of birth, father’s name and mother’s maiden name (helpfully provided, as usual, by Ann at the Social Security Administration), and requested “a copy of my birth certificate.” I paid extra to have it expedited. For my return address, I used another of those mailbox rental outlets.

For the second piece of identification I would need when applying for a driver’s license, I planned to dummy up a W-2 form, which would require me to supply the Employer Identification Number (EIN) of the W-2 issuer. It’s a simple matter to find that number for almost any company you pick at random. I called Accounts Receivable at Microsoft and asked for its EIN “so we can submit our payment.” The lady on the other end of the line gave it to me without even asking what company I was calling from.

Every stationery store carries blank tax forms; you just doctor up a phony W-2, and you’re all set.

My immediate aim was getting that all-important driver’s license, but I couldn’t move ahead with that until “my” new birth certificate arrived. It was tense for me during that time: without a driver’s license or an ID card, even being stopped for jaywalking might have been disastrous.

One hitch: I would need a car to take my test in. A car I borrowed from my mother or Gram? Hardly. If you’re setting up a new identity, you sure don’t want to leave a trail of easy-to-follow clues that will make life simple for some snoopy cop or Fed later on. Have a friend or family member rent a car for you to use long enough to take the driving test? No way—too easy for an investigator to find out what car you used for the test, and start asking the person who did you that favor some difficult questions.

Here’s the solution I came up with. First you go to the DMV and apply for a learner’s permit; you don’t actually need one, but for some reason the DMV people find it less suspicious for an adult to have one before getting his or her first license. I’ve never been sure why. But useful for me: most people trying to obtain fraudulent identities don’t go for a learner’s permit first, so it’s less suspicious.

Then you call up a driving school and say you’re just back from Australia, or South Africa, or England. You used to have a U.S. driver’s license, you explain, but now that you’ve been driving on the other side of the road for a while, you need a refresher to make sure you’re
comfortable back on the right side before you take your driver’s test. After a couple of “lessons,” the instructor will tell you you’re ready, and the school will
lend you a car to take your test in
.

This was what
I
did, anyway, more than once, and it always worked. With my new license in hand, I took myself over to the Social Security office in downtown Las Vegas to get a “replacement” Social Security card, using my Eric Weiss birth certificate and my driver’s license as my two forms of ID. It was a little worrisome: there were signs all over the place about how it was a crime to obtain a Social Security card using a false identity. One poster even showed a man in handcuffs.
Great
.

I presented my credentials and a filled-out application form. It would take about three weeks for the card to arrive, I was told—much longer than I felt comfortable staying in Vegas, but I knew I couldn’t get a job anywhere without that card.

Meanwhile I trotted around to the nearest branch library, where a librarian was happy to hand me a library card as soon as she finished typing up the info from my application.

Though my primary focus was on pulling together my new identity and deciding where I was going to live and work, Danny Yelin, formerly of Teltec but now freelancing, was still feeding me some work. One job was to serve a subpoena on a guy who lived in Vegas but was in hiding. Dan provided me with his last known phone number.

I called the number, an elderly lady answered, and I asked if the man was there. She said he wasn’t.

I told her, “I owe him some money. I can pay half now and half next week. But I’m leaving town, so I need you to call him and find out where he wants to meet me so I can pay him the first half.” And
I said I’d call back in half an hour.

After about ten minutes, I called the Switching Control Center at Centel, the local phone company. Posing as an internal employee, I had a DMS-100 switch tech do a QCM (Query Call Memory command) on the lady’s number.

She had made her most recent call about five minutes earlier, to a Motel 6 near the airport. I called and when I was connected to his room, I said I was from the front desk, and did he still need the roll-away bed he had asked about. Of course he said he hadn’t asked about a roll-away. I said, “Is this room 106?”

Sounding annoyed, he said, “No, it’s 212.” I apologized.

My grandmother was kind enough to drive me over there.

My knock was answered by “Yeah.”

“Housekeeping, you have a minute?”

He opened the door. I said, “Are you Mr. ______?”

“Yeah.”

I handed him the documents and said, “You are served. Have a nice day.”

An easy $300. As I signed the proof of service, I smiled to myself and wondered,
What would that guy think if he knew he’d just been served a subpoena by a Federal fugitive?

Once in a while I’d walk to the Sahara to have a meal in the restaurant where my mom worked, so we could see each other. Other times I’d meet Gram, my mom, and my mom’s boyfriend, Steve, at one of the other casinos, where I hoped we could get lost in the crowds. Occasionally, but not too often, I’d show up at a small casino called the Eureka, where Mom liked to play video poker after she finished her work shift.

Money was an issue. I had some but not enough. Incredibly, at age twenty-eight, I still had most of my bar mitzvah money in U.S. Treasury bonds, which I now cashed in. Between them, my mom and Gram came up with some more to tide me over until I could get settled and find a job. Altogether, my bankroll totaled about $11,000—enough to live on until I could establish my new life.

And “bankroll” was the right word for it: I had the entire amount in cash, stashed in a wallet inside a man’s carry-on bag that I toted everywhere with me.

Since I didn’t yet have my Eric Weiss “replacement” Social Security card, I couldn’t open an account at a credit union or a bank. The hotel I had chosen didn’t have a room safe like the fancier places. Rent a safety deposit box at a bank? Couldn’t do that either, for the same reason I couldn’t open an account: I’d have to show some government-issued ID.