Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (35 page)

Of course, stashing the money in my hotel room was out of the question. But how about leaving the wad with Gram? No, because then we’d have to keep meeting every time I ran out of cash. Not a very good plan if the Feds started watching her.

Still, if I had it to do over, that’s just what I would have done: left it with my grandmother, keeping no more than I needed to get by, but enough that I wouldn’t have to go back to the well very often.

Right behind the Stardust Casino and Hotel, near where I was living, there was an executive-type gym called the Sporting House. (It really
was
a gym, though in Nevada, its name might easily get it mistaken for something else. In fact, the name turned out to be a prophecy: the place is now a strip club, though under a different name.) The daughter of Las Vegas hotel tycoon Steve Wynn worked out there, so I figured it must be a cool place.

I signed up for weekly passes, determined to continue my regimen of working out for two or three hours every day. Besides keeping me in shape, the workouts offered great opportunities for girl-watching as I jammed to tunes on my Walkman radio.

One day I finished my session, went back to the locker room, and discovered that I had forgotten which locker I’d put my stuff in. I walked all around, checking every locker.

My personal padlock wasn’t on any of them.

I walked around again. Nothing.

I started opening every locker that didn’t have a lock hanging from its metal door. Finally I found the one that had my clothes inside.

My clothes. But not my bag: it wasn’t there. I felt my heart sink to my stomach. All my money, all my new identity documents—gone. Stolen. I had bought an extra-sturdy padlock to use at the gym. Though a knowledgeable perp would have known a better way, this guy had probably sneaked in with a massive pair of bolt cutters to get past it. Maybe my double-heavy-duty padlock itself had been the giveaway that there was something inside the locker worth protecting. Jesus.

I freaked out. My entire $11,000 stash had been taken. I was penniless, with no income, facing the challenge of traveling to a new city, renting an apartment, and paying my way until I could land a job and start banking a paycheck. I felt like a total idiot for having walked around carrying all my money in a bag, practically
asking
to be robbed.

When I told the on-duty gym manager, I got scant sympathy. She made some lame attempt to make me feel better by telling me that there had been a rash of similar break-ins at the gym recently.
Now
she was telling me! Then she added insult to injury by offering me four complimentary day passes to the gym. Not four months, not even one month—four
days!

Naturally, I couldn’t risk reporting the loss to the police.

The worst part was telling my mom and Gram about my unhappy predicament. I couldn’t stand the thought of causing them any more anxiety or pain. They had always been there for me, ready to help me out in any circumstances because they loved me so much. (That’s not to say they didn’t let me know often enough when they were upset with me, but they were both able to show anger without withdrawing love.) And now they came through for me again, offering to scrape together another $5,000 between them whenever I was ready for it. I’d say this was definitely a gift I didn’t deserve.

For diversion, I was going to the movies and sometimes playing blackjack at one of the casinos. I had read Kenny Uston’s book on card counting, and found I was pretty good at keeping track of the high cards—though I somehow rarely managed to walk away from the table with much more than I had laid out when I first sat down.

While I was waiting for my new Social Security card to arrive, I went back to the DMV to report my lost driver’s license and got an immediate replacement.

In the three weeks while I waited for my replacement Social Security card, I acquired as many other forms of identification as I could. By the time I was ready to leave Vegas, in addition to my library card, I also had cards for the Las Vegas Athletic Club, Blockbuster Video, as well as a bank ATM card, and a Nevada Health Card that food servers and other casino employees had to have.

The local Clark County library became a familiar hangout for me, poring over business and travel magazines in search of the destination I would head for as soon as my new identity was complete. My short list included Austin and Tampa and a few other towns, but the final decision was easy.

Not long before,
Money
magazine had rated Denver as one of the best places in the country to live. That sounded good. It wasn’t too
far away, it seemed to have a good job market for computer work, it was well rated for quality of life, and settling down there would give me my first chance to experience real
seasons—
something that my life in Southern California had always denied me. Maybe I’d even try a little skiing.

I bought pagers for my mother and me—using a phony name for the purchases, of course, and paying cash. I got a third one for Lewis. Yes, Lewis: he would be a good source of information for me. I would be setting up a channel for secret communications, and I trusted him enough—both because of and despite all our history—to feel sure that if he got wind the Feds were up to something, he’d sound the alarm.

We established a code and a routine to be used in case of emergencies. If my mom needed to get in touch, she would send me a pager message identifying one of the big Vegas hotels. Our code for the Mirage, for example, was “7917111”—the Mirage phone number less the area code. Of course, the area code is the same for all the Vegas hotels, and leaving it off might make the location a tiny bit more difficult to guess for anyone who might be intercepting our pager communications. Another part of the code indicated urgency: “1” meant “At your convenience, please call me”; “2” was “Call me as soon as possible”; and “3” signaled “Call me immediately, it’s an emergency.” When
I
was the one trying to reach
her
, I’d just page her with a random number and priority code, and then she’d send back the number for the hotel she was at.

Whoever initiated the exchange, the routine was the same. After receiving the number for the casino she was at, I’d call and ask the operator to page someone for me and would give the name of a friend from Mom’s past. It was never the same one twice in a row; I always rotated them. (“Mary Schultz” is one I remember.)

When she heard a page with a name she recognized, she’d pick up a house phone and the operator would put my call through.

If the Feds wanted someone badly enough, I knew, they could find a way to wiretap the pay phones that a close relative or associate regularly used. So why take the chance? A casino hotel routinely handled dozens of phone calls at a time, maybe hundreds. Even if McGuire and company were determined enough to keep an eye on my mother in hopes I
would call her and reveal my location, they could not easily track a call passing through the busy switchboard of a place like Caesars Palace.

Since I’d never been a fugitive before except for the few months in Oroville as a juvenile, I had no way of knowing how I’d react. Stepping so far off the grid was scary, but I could already tell I was going to enjoy it. It felt like the start of an exciting adventure.

I
t would be the first time I’d ever been completely on my own. Going to live in Denver without my mom and Gram seemed strange but also exhilarating. When my plane took off from Vegas, I would literally disappear into the ether; once in my new hometown, I’d start hiding in plain sight.

Can you imagine the freedom of starting your life over again, taking on a new name and identity? Of course, you’d miss your family and friends, the comfort of familiar places, but if you could put that part aside for a moment, wouldn’t it feel like a great adventure?

During the flight to the “Mile High City,” I felt a growing sense of anticipation. When the United Airlines plane landed, it was a bit anticlimactic: Denver was overcast and gloomy that afternoon. I got into a cab and asked the driver to take me to a hotel in a good neighborhood where I could rent a room by the week. The place he picked out was in what he referred to as “hotel row.”

I would rate the hotel at about two-and-a-half stars, or something on the order of a Motel 6. It turned out not to offer a weekly rate after all, but with a little persuasion I managed to negotiate one I could live with.

Because of the way the movies portray it, people assume that living as a fugitive means always looking over your shoulder, in constant fear of discovery. In the years that followed, I would have that experience only rarely. For the most part, once I’d established my new identity and solidified it with verifiable, government-issued ID, I felt secure. Just to be on
the safe side, I always set up early-warning systems so I’d be tipped off if someone came looking for me. And if I noticed anyone getting close, I would take immediate action. But from the very start, I would be enjoying myself the vast majority of the time.

My first order of business in any new city was to compromise the local phone company so I could prevent anyone from easily tracking me. For starters, I’d need one of the dial-up phone numbers that field techs used to call into the phone company switch. I would get the number for the Central Office that handled the telephone exchanges I wanted to gain control of. I’d call and say something like, “Hi. This is Jimmy over in Engineering. How you doin’ today?”

Then I’d follow up with, “What’s the dial-up for the VDU?”—using the shorthand term for the Visual Display Unit, which gives a tech full access to the switch from a remote location. The neat part was that if the switch was a 1AESS, you didn’t even need a password to access it. Whoever made that decision must have figured that anyone who knew the phone number was authorized.

Usually the guy I got on the line would give me the phone number for dialing into the switch of his Central Office. But if a tech challenged me, I knew enough about the system to make up a plausible excuse on the fly. It might be something like, “We’re setting up a new dial-out system here and programming all the dial-up numbers into our outgoing dialer software. So if any switch engineers have to dial in, they can just instruct the modem to dial a particular office.”

Once I had the phone number for dialing into the switch, I could do pretty much anything I liked. If I wanted to have a series of conversations with someone in, say, Japan, I’d find an unassigned phone number, take it over, add call forwarding, and then activate it to forward any incoming calls anywhere I wanted. Then, from my cell phone, I could make a local call to the previously unassigned phone number and have a clear, direct connection from the switch straight to the guy in Japan, instead of having to deal with an unreliable international cell phone connection.

And I would also routinely use the technique called “masking”—setting up a chain of call-forwarding numbers in switches of several cities in different parts of the country. Then, calling the first number in the
chain, my call would be passed along the chain from city to city, ultimately to the number I wanted—making it extremely time-consuming for anyone to trace the calls back to me.

My calls weren’t just free, they were virtually untraceable.

My first morning in Denver, I sat down with a local newspaper and began circling job ads for computer work. I was looking for any company that used my favorite operating system, VMS.

I created a separate résumé for each likely-sounding ad, tailored to the particular qualifications listed. As a rule, I’d read the qualifications they were looking for and tailor a résumé that showed I had around 90 percent of the skills on the company’s wish list. If I claimed every sought-after skill, I figured the HR people or the head of IT might wonder,
If he’s that good, why is he applying for such a low-level job?

My résumé would list only a single previous job so I wouldn’t have to create more than one past-job reference. The trick here was to keep copies of all the material I sent out so I’d know what I had written when someone called me in for an interview. Along with the résumé, I’d include a well-polished cover letter to introduce myself.

My skill at writing these phony résumés and letters paid off within a couple of weeks. I was invited for an interview at, of all places, the local office of a prominent international law firm, Holme, Roberts and Owen, which had offices in Denver, Salt Lake City, Boulder, London, and Moscow.

Dressed in a suit and tie and looking, I thought, perfectly suitable for a job in an upscale law firm, I was shown into a conference room to meet with the IT manager, a very friendly lady named Lori Sherry.

I’m good at interviews, but this one was a little more exciting than most as I struggled not to be distracted: Lori was really attractive. But—bummer—she was wearing a wedding band.

She started off with what must be a standard opening: “Tell me a little about yourself.”

I tried for charming and charismatic, the style that the remake of
Ocean’s Eleven
would capture a few years later. “I broke up with my girlfriend and wanted to get away. The company I was working for offered me more money to stay, but I knew it would be better to start fresh in a different city.”