Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (28 page)

"For what?"

"To get the dough. "

"Serious?" his friend asks.

"Yeah. Hold on. Let me make sure he's got it today waiting for me. Hold on, " Julio says.

Back to Alfredo.

"Could he have it there waiting for me today?" Julio asks.

"What, the money?"

No, a firm handshake, Alfredo. What do you think?

"I guess he could, " Alfredo says. "I'll call, hold on, let me call him up, " Alfredo says. "Let me go get his number wait up.

"

"All right, I'll be back in a second, " Julio says.

Alfredo is consigned to hold again.

Julio goes back to his friend, to whom he confides, "He thinks so. He's calling the guy up right now. "

"Oh my God. "

"That... guy is for real because I've known him through someone else as being like a big spender and everything, you know? Like Alfredo is full of bullshit. If he says five hundred, expect three hundred, you know?" Julio says.

"Yeah. "

"Like, he's just full of moronic bull. But the other guy I know is for real, " Julio says. "I've got to score big. If I tell you why, you'll laugh at me and say, 'You're a moron, Julio. '"

"What?"

"No, " says Julio. It's too much to share his secret.

"What? Like bootleg alcohol?"

"Yeah, come on, you know I'm not into that kind of stuff, " Julio says.

"So what?"

"I want to buy, uh, a skycar. Yeah. " There, he's said it.

"Oh my God. "

"Shut up, okay? It was on TV. Did you watch TV last night?" Julio asks.

"Yeah. "

"You saw the Bundys, right?"

"Yeah. "

"Well, while you were wasting your time watching the Bundys, I was watching 'Beyond Tomorrow' and they got this fresh

no, I'm not even going to explain it to you because you're going to make light of it, " Julio says.

"Julio, I've seen it before. "

"It's fresh, right? Yo, I'll give my life for that. "

These conversations, of course, were being recorded by the Secret Service in the command center suite at the World Trade Center, and meticulously transcribed. This call, in fact, was known as Call No: Red 3662-3697. Isn't eavesdropping the most amazing thing? You can see why people do it.

Julio switches back to Alfredo, who hasn't yet reached Morty.

Julio proposes that he and his friend come down to wait for Morty at Alfredo's, but Alfredo says that's not such a good idea

his grandmother was coming over today.

"We can hang out outside at McDonald's, and then like walk into your house once in a while, " Julio says.

So a deal is struck. They'll meet at Alfredo's apartment, then go over to the McDonald's on Columbus Avenue, the one on 91st Street, a couple of blocks away. Alfredo tells Julio that if this deal works out, Morty might become a steady customer.

He tells Julio that if he can provide a steady supply of Information America accounts, Julio will earn up to five hundred dollars a week.

That's a lot of money. Julio could use a lot of money. Five hundred dollars a week is enough money to buy a lot of pairs of shoes. That was enough money to share.

After Julio disengages both his phone lines, he gets another call.

From John.

"Yo, meet me at Alfredo's house in like two hours, okay?" Julio says.

"Why?"

"Because me and my buddy, we're going down there. We're going to meet this guy Morty. We're going to take Alfredo out of the fucking loop. He's not going to be a part of it. "

"What do you mean?" John asks.

"Because Alfredo is already getting too close with Morty and Morty gave him like a dial last night... for like a TRW

account, " Julio says.

"Get out of here. "

"... Morty... runs like a PI thing... "

"Oh yeah?"

"And he's going to buy, " Julio says. "Just meet me down there in like two hours, okay?... I need money for tonight's party.

"

Julio says that John should bypass Alfredo's house and go directly to the second floor of McDonald's.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to sort of accidentally run into you... and then you'll be part of it, " Julio says.

Now John's a part of the deal. Hey, that was cool.

One thing about John and Julio. They both had this impression of this Morty guy. They both thought he was rich. He had to be rich: he "has access" to a car.

"Did he definitely give Alfredo a thousand dollars or something?" John asks.

"Yeah, he gave him money, yeah. "

But a thousand?

"I think so. "

"But you don't know, " John says.

"Even if we don't get that, you know, who cares?" says Julio.

"I know. "

"I'd do it for twenty, " Julio says.

"I know. Right. Like I would take a hundred, " John says. "Because that's like a pair of sneakers and shit. "

There is something incongruous about a McDonald's in Manhattan. You don't expect to see the Golden Arches right there, amid all the honking taxicabs and roaring fire trucks and panhandlers. But there was this big neon sign on the outside of the building, touting the McDonald's "space station" inside, which makes the place seem even sillier than usual.

McDonald's in Manhattan always smells greasier than McDonald's in the suburbs. Maybe that was because you can't throw open any windows to let out any of that refried air.

Today, all the action was taking place on the second floor of the two-story fast food restaurant. Morty buys the burgers.

John acts as the lookout while everybody eats. Yeah, Alfredo is there, too.

The sun was already starting to go down, and it was cold. It was the kind of weather that makes you want to fill your stomach with a burger.

Julio has arrived at McDonald's with valid account information that he plans to sell Morty, but before they do the deal, John pulls him aside and talks Julio out of it. Give him "dead stuff, " John says, meaning accounts that are no longer good. That'll get Morty off your back, John says.

Julio isn't so sure. He really wants the money.

Of course, Morty doesn't hear any of this byplay. Morty has these dark tight ringlets all over his head, hair so curly you can't tell how long it really is, and he keeps looking around, kind of nervous, just looking.

So then, Julio and John give Morty some accounts that they say he can use to pull credit histories. They tell him it's the good stuff.

Morty gives them some money, just pulls it out of his pocket in a big fat wad, and peels off a bunch of fifty-dollar bills.

Fifty-dollar bills. He gives Julio ten of them, and John gets four.

John decides the deal isn't such a bad idea after all. Seven hundred bucks for outdated accounts. Sure sounded like a good deal.

The meeting lasts about half an hour.

The MOD boys walk outside and leave Morty in front of McDonald's. They head down to a neighborhood pizzeria, Alfredo trailing. They have a lot to talk about.

Morty walks off in the other direction. It will be interesting to see if these accounts work, he thinks.

Of course, maybe Morty wouldn't be losing anything if they don't work John would later say the fifties were counterfeit.

In fact, Morty complained to Alfredo that the accounts didn't work. After a number of phone calls, disclaimers, recriminations, and posturing, Julio finally gave Morty a valid TRW account. Morty proceeded to use the account, diving into the credit union database as if he were on some kind of supermarket shopping spree. In less than a week, Morty had pulled 175 credit reports.

One night, around ten o'clock, Mark and Julio are on the phone, just talking about the things friends talk about. Julio's not thinking about the deal he did with Morty; he's not thinking about the possible repercussions. He's thinking about something much more existential, like what would you do if you found out you had cancer?

"I'd just, I'd tell it, the whole world, everything, " Mark says. "If I knew I was going to die in a year, I would still keep it to myself for like eight months, you know. "

"Until you were like on your deathbed or something, " Mark says.

"Yeah. "

"Then you'd like make appearances on national TV and tell the world. "

"No, I would rather like give it to a couple of people, " Julio says.

"Why? You think you'd only give it to a couple of friends?" Mark asks. "If I was going to die? I'd want to piss off the phone company as much as I could. So I'd like tell the whole world everything. "

"No, you know what I would probably do?"

"What?" Mark asks.

"Instead of telling everyone, I would like crash everything. "

"Nah, the crashing everything isn't fun, " Mark says. "Because they could always say, 'Oh it was equipment failure, '

before they'd admit that a hacker did it. "

"Say I'm dying, " says Julio.

"Or do it while you're on TV, " Mark says. "That's even better. "

"Yeah, like Channel Four, right?"

"It's like, here, I'm about to knock out phone service in Texas, click, and then you go, like, demonstrate, you go and call Texas, " Mark says. "And it's like, why would you do something like this? Oh, I'll be dead in a couple of weeks. "

"Like say I'm taking out 911 in the South Bronx, " Julio says.

"Yeah, right. "

"And then, imagine, like a doctor runs in. I was wrong!

those were your dog's X-rays!" Julio says. "And like you're perfectly okay, and then you're like, oops. "

"I know. And then like you have a heart attack and die. "

"No, you don't have a heart attack. You get arrested, " Julio says. "And like, why'd you do it?"

"No, but then you have a stroke on the way to jail, " Mark says.

"I would probably kill myself if I knew I was going to get in that much trouble, " Julio says.

Julio could only remember seeing his father cry twice. Just twice, in his whole life, once on the day of Julio's grandfather's funeral and a second time on December 6, 1991.

That was the day the Secret Service raided Julio's apartment, carting off every bit of computer equipment in the place, even confiscating the dark-colored backpack Julio carried to school every day.

For months, Julio had been feeling confident, thinking himself immune to the process of justice, as he called it. He'd seen plenty of hackers get raided and nothing bad had ever happened to them. Why should he worry? Mark never went to jail.

Eli never went to jail. Paul never went to jail. In fact, in the nearly two years that have passed since the first federal raids of the MOD case, Eli and Paul had never even been charged with any crimes. To Julio, those first raids seemed silly, almost mythical. The 1990 raids his friends had endured seemed like

well, like a badge of honor more than anything

else.

But then, the Secret Service agents showed up at Julio's house at 11 A. M., and they carted out his Apple IIc, his monitor, his modem, his manuals and documents, his records and notebooks, his floppies, his cassette tapes. Just like that. It was gone. All gone.

Julio was not at home at the time. His brother Louis was there, though, and he told the agents that Julio was on his way to school. More agents out on the street were already following Julio. They had followed him down from the Bronx to Manhattan, where they were watching him making a call from a pay phone at Forty-second and Park. Later, they took his backpack, and all the cassette tapes and the floppy disk inside it. And when Julio got home, he realized this was not a joke, not at all. His dad was crying, and there went Julio's bravado.

Of course, Julio was not the only one who got raided on this cold December day. Allen Wilson's two-story, single-family home on Moon Drive in Fallsington, Pennsylvania, was also included. In the search warrant application, the Secret Service told the judge that during a phone conversation Allen had told John of stealing electronic mail messages meant for Chris Goggans. A photo of a federal agent at Allen's house would show up in Allen's local paper soon after the raid.

John got raided, too. He lost his Zenith compact TV as well as his computer. Alfredo got raided, but you might have expected that. He'd been running his own call-sell operation, selling people longdistance service over some unwitting corporate switchboard. And Morty Rosenfeld got raided. Mark got raided the only member of MOD to earn a second

visit. He sat on the couch in his living room, listening to an agent read his Miranda rights. "You have the right to remain silent... " The little speech was printed on a business card. The agent flipped it, and Mark saw "NYNEX" written on the front. The agent asked Mark to initial the card to acknowledge the exchange.

The federal agents took boxes and boxes of computer equipment. Really, sometimes it seemed more like a job for a moving company than a crack law enforcement agency.

And then, for a few months, history repeated itself. Nobody heard another word from the government.

Stephen Fishbein sat in his office high above Lower Manhattan, trying to create a criminal case from a morass. He had too much information, and no sense of a pattern. He knows John and Julio have sold access codes to Morty that's

obviously illegal. But beyond that isolated incident? Fishbein had millions of bytes of data from datatap sessions, pages and pages of transcribed notes from nearly five thousand phone conversations, toll records, DNRs, and now, boxes and boxes full of floppy disks, hard drives, and notebooks seized in the raids. He knows the case is bigger than just John and Julio and TRW and Southwestern Bell. But he has no idea how things fit together. Where to start?

He reads. And one day, he comes across a single document that sets a new direction for the case: "The History of MOD.

" The History of MOD told the whole story of how five boys knew each other, the scope of their relationship. It was a starting point.

There was an organized group involved, they even had a name for themselves, MOD, and they dated back to 1989. And here was John and Julio coming into the gang as Corrupt and Outlaw and... wait a minute they were talking about how

they got raided by the Secret Service once before!