Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (49 page)

The bank opened at 9:00 a.m., and guess who was the first customer through the door? I closed out my checking account—it had only about four thousand dollars in it, but I was going to need every penny of that for my next disappearing act.

The local cops had grabbed my laptop, floppy disks, my second radio scanner, computer peripherals, and unencrypted backup tapes. It could be only a matter of days before they figured out that Brian Merrill, the cell phone cloner, was really Kevin Mitnick, the Feds’ most wanted hacker.

Or did they already know?

For any clever social engineer, the answer to a question like that is never hard to come by.

Placing a call to the office of the Seattle district attorney, I asked which DA handled electronic fraud cases.

“Ivan Orton,” I was told.

Calling Orton’s secretary, I told her, “This is Special Agent Robert Terrance, Secret Service. Do you have a copy of the search warrant and affidavit on the cell phone case from last night?”

“No, you’ll have to call Records,” and she recited the number.

The lady in Records asked me for the address where the search had taken place. When I told her, she said, “Oh, yes, I have it right here.”

“Great. I’m in the field, can you please fax me a copy?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t have a fax machine in Records.”

That didn’t faze me. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

No fax machine in the Records Office? Incredible. We’re talking 1994 here;
everybody
had a fax. But no—calls to other offices in the
building revealed that the City of Seattle apparently didn’t have much of a budget for fax machines.

I finally discovered that the Law Library had one. By the time I’d finished making arrangements, the lady from the Law Library was on her way up to the Records Office to fetch a copy of the affidavit so she could get the fax sent to “the Secret Service agent” who needed it. I had it faxed to a Kinko’s in Bellevue, waited until I thought it would’ve been received, used my standard routine for laundering a fax, and picked it up minutes later from the second Kinko’s location—all done in such a short interval that there was no chance the cops or Secret Service could have shown up in time.

I sat down in a coffee shop and pored over the affidavit, absorbing every word. I learned that two cellular phone fraud investigators had been tailing me for several weeks. I flashed back to a Jeep that had been parked across the street one day with a man sitting in it. Son of a bitch! My gut had been right—he was one of the investigators. The statements in the search warrant showed that these guys had been eavesdropping on my calls for weeks. I thought of the calls I made to my mom several times a week; she would sometimes speak my name when she picked up my call in the casino. Yet evidently they had missed that. They must have known or at least sensed I wasn’t just some kid using a cloned cell phone, yet they were clueless about my real identity. If they had suspected I was the sought-after Kevin Mitnick, they would have staked out my apartment and waited all night for me to come home.

I was worried that they had recorded my calls or perhaps even taken photographs of me. Knowing that they had heard my voice, I called Lewis so he could chew over the situation with me and help assess the damage. I came up with a plan. Lewis would call one of the private investigators and see what information he could find out. I really needed to know if they had any tapes or photos.

I was on the line, listening in, my cell phone muted. Lewis called a private investigator named Kevin Pazaski, and pretended to be prosecutor Ivan Orton.

Pazaski said, “We have a meeting tomorrow at your office.”

Lewis seized the opportunity and replied, “Yes, our meeting is still on, but I have a few urgent questions.” He asked if he had any tape
recordings. Pazaski said no—they had monitored conversations and made notes, but no tapes.

Whew! That was a relief! Next, Lewis asked if they had any photos of the suspect. Again, the answer was no. Thank God! Lewis then added the icing to the cake: “Okay, Kevin, I’ll have more questions prepared for our meeting tomorrow. See you then.”

Despite how stressed-out I was, Lewis and I started laughing after he hung up, just imagining those guys’ reaction at the big meeting the next day when they realized they had been conned. But by then it would be too late for them to do anything about it. I had the information I wanted.

It was worth the effort. From the documents, I confirmed that the raid had been intended to nab somebody who had been making lots of unauthorized cell phone calls. Nothing about Kevin Mitnick.

That was why the agents had just left a card saying I should pay the Seattle Police a call. The cops didn’t think it was worth hanging around just to catch some college student who’d figured out how to make free cell phone calls.

Under different circumstances, I might have felt relieved.

I left Seattle on a Greyhound bus headed for Tacoma, where I would board a train for Portland, and then fly the last leg of the trip to Los Angeles.

En route, I called Ron Austin and told him I had been raided. Turned out my talking to Ron wasn’t such a great idea: like Petersen, he had become a snitch in the hope of getting a reduced sentence. He’d been recording our conversations and turning the tapes over to the FBI, playing both sides all along: being a friend to me by giving me the California DMV access… while at the same time cooperating with the Feds. He was out on bail, gathering information on Lewis and me for FBI Special Agent McGuire and company. I’ll admit he did a clever job of gaining my trust by giving me access to the DMV database.

Now he called his Bureau handler to let him know that the guy the Secret Service had just raided for cell phone cloning was really Kevin Mitnick. I hadn’t told him what city I was in, but I’m sure it didn’t take the Secret Service very long to figure it out.

(In a conversation we had while I was writing this book, Austin also
revealed an interesting tidbit: the Feds cloned his pager and waited for my calls to get the pay phone number and the time I would be calling so they could attempt to trace my next call. They didn’t realize that I had full access to the telco switches that controlled the numbers I was calling—and that I always checked for any traps and watched for any switch messages indicating that a trace was being done in real time. I had to be cautious, especially with a skilled hacker like Austin. My countermeasures were obviously effective: the Feds had never showed up at my door.)

Arriving in LA, I picked a hotel conveniently near Union Station. Getting up in the middle of the night, I turned on the light to find dozens of cockroaches skittering around the floor.
Ewwww!
I had to put on my shoes just to walk the few steps to the bathroom, first cautiously shaking out each shoe to be sure it wasn’t occupied by any of the critters. The chills down my spine were overwhelming: I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I was gone fifteen minutes later, moving to a place called the Metro Plaza Hotel, which I chose because it had a special meaning for me. When I was held in solitary confinement at LA’s Federal Metropolitan Detention Center, my room had looked out over this hotel. How often I had wished I could be there instead of in my ten-by-eight-foot room with its stonelike mattress!

I hadn’t seen my dad in a long time. He listened to the story of my near arrest and the cops not even knowing they had almost nabbed a guy the Bureau had been hunting for two years. I got an absence of response from him, as if he didn’t know how to help me. It was as if I were describing a scene from a movie or something pulled from my creative imagination.

I called Bonnie, said I was in LA, and wanted to get together. Why call her? There weren’t many people I could talk to about my predicament. My hacking buddies, one after another, had turned disloyal. There wasn’t anybody else in Los Angeles I could trust.

She had her own reason for being willing to see me. De Payne knew that my computer, tapes, and disks had been seized in Seattle, and he wanted to know how much of our correspondence the cops might have found—and how much of it would incriminate him. Bonnie was probably
serving the interests of her lover, hoping to get some assurances from me that the Seattle Police and the Secret Service weren’t going to turn up any information in my electronic files that could land him in trouble.

We met, and I told her I had lost everything and needed to start over. Though the files on my computer were encrypted, I had backed up most of them onto cartridge tapes, unencrypted, that I’d been about to stash in my bank safety deposit box. But I’d never made it to the bank with the tapes, which meant that either the Feds or the local Seattle cops had all that information, unencrypted.

She could see I was freaking out. She tried to calm me down and offer advice, but we both knew that my only options were to turn myself in and suffer months, if not years, of solitary confinement, or to keep playing the game of “catch me if you can.” I had all along opted for the latter, and the stakes were even higher now because the charge would no longer be a mere violation of my supervised release: with the evidence from my seized computer in Seattle, the Feds now had plenty of hard evidence of my hacking.

I felt Bonnie’s intuition: she was sure it would be just a matter of time before I got caught, and she was worried for me. But I just had to give it my best shot and deal with the consequences later. It was nice to see her again for the first time since I’d gone on the run, but given that my ex was living with my best hacking partner, a distance between us was only natural.

By the time I reached Vegas a week later, my mom and Gram had pretty much calmed down from their panic at my near arrest. When I saw them, I was washed in the full flood of their love and concern.

Desperately in need of a new identity, and knowing it would be dangerous to use any of the names from the South Dakota list since all that information was also on the unencrypted backup tapes that the cops had grabbed in the Seattle raid, I targeted the largest college in Oregon’s largest city, Portland State University.

After compromising the server for the Admissions Office, I called the database administrator. “I’m new in the Admissions Office,” I told him. “And I need to look at…,” and then I described the parameters of what I was looking for: people who had received undergraduate degrees between 1985 and 1992. He spent a good forty-five minutes on the phone
with me, explaining how the records were organized and the commands I needed to extract all the student data for graduates in the years of interest. He was so helpful that he gave me even more than I was asking for.

When we were done, I had access to 13,595 student records, each one complete with a student’s full name, date of birth, degree, year of degree, Social Security number, and home address.

For the time being, I needed only one of the thousands. I would become Michael David Stanfill.

The heat was on. The Feds had probably figured out by now that I’d slipped through their fingers again. This time my Vegas trip would be short, just long enough to let me set up a new identity—two to three weeks. Then I needed to scat quickly in case the Feds got desperate enough to start following my mother, her boyfriend, or my grandmother.

I had to make headway on building my new identity as Michael Stanfill. For the driver’s license, after the familiar steps of getting a certified copy of the birth certificate and making a phony W-2, I applied for a learner’s permit, offering the lady at the DMV my familiar explanation that I needed a few lessons because I had been living in London where we drove on the other side of the road.

It had only been a couple of years since I had gotten my Eric Weiss driver’s license at the DMV in Las Vegas, so I felt a bit uneasy about going back—especially since I knew the Feds might now be on the alert for my trying to get a new identity. The closest DMV office outside of Las Vegas was in the desert town of Pahrump, which is famous for two things: the popular radio personality Art Bell lives there, and it’s also the home of the Chicken Ranch, the infamous legal brothel. Under Nevada law, prostitution is permitted in that part of the state.

I combed the Yellow Pages looking for a driving school in Pahrump. Finding none, I started calling places in Vegas (though of course carefully avoiding the one I had used a couple years back as Eric Weiss), asking if I could use one of their cars for my drive test in Pahrump. After being told several times, “Sorry, we don’t send our people out to Pahrump,” I finally found a school that would provide a car, give a one-hour lesson to a guy who was “just back from London and in need of a refresher for driving on the right side of the road,” and wait while I took the test—all for $200. Fine. Two hundred bucks was a cheap price for a new identity.

Gram drove me the hour to Pahrump; I asked her to wait for me down the road at a restaurant because it would be too risky for both of us if something went wrong the way it had at Kinko’s on that Christmas Eve of recent memory.

We arrived twenty minutes early, and I sat inside the tiny DMV office on a cheap plastic chair, anxiously waiting for the school’s car to drive up. In less than two hours I should be able to walk out with my brand-new identity in the name of Michael David Stanfill.

As I looked up, the driving instructor walked in the door. Son of a bitch! It was the
same guy
I’d had for my Eric Weiss identity two years earlier. He must have changed driving schools. Just my luck!