Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (29 page)

"The History of MOD, " the tale that Eli had concocted so innocuously, had become the blueprint Fishbein used to understand who all these boys were, how they all worked together as a group. Hey, the guys from the old case were totally in with the new guys. In fact, the old guys were giving instructions to the new guys! The document even hinted at murky "fringe benefits" the boys got from hacking. It said each person in the group has his own illegal specialty!

Before anybody knew what was going on, Fishbein and Harris were riding out to the Eastern District to talk to the prosecutors there. And now Fishbein heard the whole story. He knows Mark is a repeat offender. He knows this conspiracy dates back several years. He learns that the Eastern District even sent off all the evidence seized in the 1990

raids to Bellcore, where the earlier crop of floppies and drives and notebooks had been scrupulously analyzed. Page after page of Mark's notebooks, crammed full of phone numbers, commands, user names, and doodles of a surfer catching a wave in the margin

all had been analyzed. Bellcore's work was so thorough that the prosecutors could use the notes to say, with authority, that a certain phone number he wrote on page 3 is to a switch. A user ID on page 11 was a valid login you could use to get into the switch. This command here on page 67 functioned on the switch. Page after page of hieroglyphics decoded. As for the doodling, well, the surfer seemed to be just a surfer.

Fishbein decided the best thing to do now was to separate the cases of Morty and Alfredo from the case of the MOD

boys. That seemed to be a natural division; the involvement of Morty and Alfredo was on the fringe of what really happened. It would be easier to get indictments and it wouldn't confuse the jurors. Sure enough, Morty was indicted.

Alfredo was indicted. What was next?

In the spring of 1992, a grand jury began to hear the evidence that Fishbein has accumulated, sorted, digested, and turned into a story: "The History of MOD. "

The letters arrive in June of 1992.

The letters come in long white envelopes, and look very stern and official. They are mailed to the MOD members who got raided in 1990 and 1991. Mark, Paul, Eli, John, and Julio all get them. "You are the target of a grand jury investigation, "

each letter says.

Paul remembers it as an odd sensation, opening his letter, reading it, processing the information the letter meant to convey. You are the target of a grand jury investigation. Paul hadn't really been a part of any MOD group activities for more than two years at this point, he'd dropped out of the scene after the 1990 raids. And yet here it was, the whole mess from his late adolescence rising up to haunt him as a young man. Was Paul even the same person two years later? He was an adult now, an adult being held accountable for a child's actions. Would the grand jury realize that? The grand jury.

Just saying the words to himself was terrifying. There was a group of people impaneled (impaneled) in some court, hearing testimony about him. They were sitting there, all day, in a room, hearing witnesses describe all kinds of illegal things he'd supposedly done. Who were these witnesses? What were they saying? What could they know of Paul? What, exactly, did he do, during those long ago late-night hacking sessions? He tried to remember.

Imagine a roomful of strangers all listening intently to the most intimate details of your hacking forays, all trying to comprehend exactly what you did when, all relying on the prosecutor to make this confusing technical jargon understandable. Fewer than one family in three even owned a personal computer, fewer still had modems. Good luck.

Allen's a really helpful guy. Sure he is. Look at him making these annoying trips from Pennsylvania to Manhattan whenever the prosecutor called. Allen's family hired a lawyer to accompany him.

The other boys heard that his lawyer had put together a nice deal for Allen. That Allen was cooperating against his friends. The feds were grateful, the other MOD boys hear. Allen's information was helping build a stronger case against them.

Most of the boys didn't have the cash to hire their own attorneys. Paul, Mark, Eli, and John will get court-appointed lawyers. Mark got assigned a good lawyer, but he still worried privately even as he called the charges "nonsense. " It bothered him more than you could see. He felt it in his stomach, the rat gnawing at his gut. Eli's lawyer complained to Fishbein that Eli was being unfairly lumped in with the rest of the boys; after all, Eli hadn't owned a computer for two years. Yes, Fishbein says, but he had Eli's voice, in late 1991, on the phone asking his friends to provide him with illegal credit information from TRW. Paul got a court-appointed lawyer named Marjorie Peerce, who told him one day that the assistant U. S. Attorney in charge of the case wanted to speak with him.

That was how Paul and Fishbein met for the first time.

They were not likely to hit it off. Paul is shy and sullen, wears his hair halfway down his back, cinched in a ponytail.

Fishbein is aggressive and sure of himself, an alumnus both of Yale Law School and a Scarsdale childhood, with neat dark hair and simple round eyeglasses. They are not that far apart in age, born less than fifteen years apart, in fact, but they might as well have been from different centuries. Fishbein likes opera and ballet, and he retires at night to a studio apartment where he plays classical music on an upright piano positioned in the exact center of an Oriental rug. He does not have a computer in his home.

Fishbein has told Marjorie Peerce that if Paul wants leniency, he should tell the truth about exactly what he did and when he did it. Fishbein felt some sympathy for these boys, although he could not empathize with their actions. He is not a man who has ever contemplated breaking the law. But most of the other defendants he'd faced as a prosecutor have been more obviously hardened criminals, men who were selling drugs, or involved in drug conspiracies, or taking bribes at banks or savings and loans. The crimes of these boys were different. They were committed in the first flush of adolescent bad judgment, not in the cold avaricious world of drug dealing and sleazy bribery.

Fishbein's objective at this stage of the game was to get as much information as possible from any of the MOD boys willing to talk. He wanted to hear Paul's story.

So Marjorie Peerce and Paul go down to St. Andrews Plaza, which houses the U. S. Attorney's office in lower Manhattan.

The relentlessly modular building is jammed into a too-small spot hard by venerable Saint Andrew's Church. Two hundred years ago, Saint Andrew's Church must have looked grand, but now it looks like an old barnacle ready to be scraped away by progress. Paul and his lawyer pass through a metal detector in the lobby, and wear sticky badges that proclaim their visitor status. They go upstairs to Fishbein's offices, and Paul is struck by how businesslike the whole situation is.

Secret Service Agent Rick Harris is there, too. They all sit around a table in a conference room, and Fishbein isn't trying to intimidate Paul, he just lays out the facts. He tells Paul this is real serious business.

Marjorie Peerce has told Paul beforehand that it would be a good idea to express some remorse at this juncture in the meeting, so Paul just lowers his head, trying to look like a pussycat when you yell at it.

Then Paul tells Fishbein that he hasn't been involved in MOD's computer intrusions since the 1990 raids. He doesn't admit to Fishbein that he's been secretly logging in to New York University's computer system, and then dialing out from an account there to make free longdistance phone calls. He doesn't admit that he's been doing the same thing with the Hunter College system in Manhattan. And that will count against him.

Someone asks Paul to leave the room.

The rest of them stay behind, and a few minutes later, Marjorie Peerce comes out to tell Paul that the prosecutors won't budge. There's no way Paul can escape being indicted. She says that the only way to escape is to testify against his friends. (What Paul remembers hearing even years later when he imagines this incident, is the suggestion that he rat. ) Paul thinks Peerce's suggestion over. He's been puzzling over this for a while now, ever since the rumors started about how Allen was cooperating. Paul thinks about how he's in the middle of college, how jail could really screw up his life.

Paul thinks about how dumb this whole situation is, no place for the valedictorian of Thomas Edison High School to be, about how his explorations on the Laurelton switch occurred so long ago that it feels like a different lifetime.

Then Paul opens his mouth, and he says, without explanation, "No way. "

Paul doesn't tell anybody what he's really thinking, which is this: I'd rather live six months being locked up somewhere with some degree of honor, than to be dishonorable and walk freely in the streets.

Those are Paul's words. Those are Paul's thoughts. But how could you say it out loud without sounding foolish?

There's not much left to say, and a few minutes later, Paul and his lawyer leave the building. They ride down in the elevator to the lobby, past the metal detector, out the doors to the plaza strewn with pigeon droppings.

The indictment has eleven counts. Each count is punishable by at least five years in jail. Each count carries a maximum fine of $250, 000.

The first count the grand jury charges is conspiracy. The indictment charges that all of the boys conspired to "gain access to and control of computer systems in order to enhance their image and prestige among computer hackers, " a violation of Title 18 of the U. S. Criminal Code.

The other counts charge some of the individual boys with unauthorized access to computers (switches and Tymnet), possession of unauthorized access devices (long-distance calling card numbers), four counts of interception of electronic communications (snatching IDs and passwords from Tymnet files), and four counts of wire fraud (stealing the use of New York University's phone lines to make phone calls to El Paso and Seattle). The indictment is full of fancy language that was really saying only one thing: You could go to jail. So could you and you and you and you. For a long time.

Paul could get five years.

Eli could get five years.

Mark could get ten years.

Julio could get thirty-five years.

John could get forty-five years.

The case is so big, so sensational, so groundbreaking that the U. S. Attorney himself calls a press conference in the lobby at St. Andrews Plaza. He wants to announce the indictment to the media. It's a little off-putting, the rows of folding chairs hastily arranged with their backs to the metal detector and the bullet-proof U. S. marshal's booth. A stream of New York's finest

the press corps, that is

slouches in and starts bitching for handouts.

The indictment is a twenty-three-page document dense with facts, counts, and legalese. The press release that explains what the indictment is trying to say is eight pages long. And then there are charts that Secret Service Agent Rick Harris arranges on an easel. This was before Ross Perot, remember, and the charts are a novel idea. Among other things, the charts explain what a switch is.

The basic point the prosecution is trying to get across is the national scope of the computer intrusions.

"This is the crime of the future, " says U. S. Attorney Otto Ober-maier, a tall, patrician man in a dark suit. He points a finger to underscore his distaste for computer crimes. "The message that ought to be delivered from this indictment is that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated. "

These five boys were being charged with the most widespread intrusions of the nation's largest and most sensitive computer systems ever recorded. The government has decided to make an example of these teenagers from the outer boroughs. The message, which is what Obermaier calls it, is zero tolerance. If you're a hacker, thinking of following in the footsteps of the Masters of Deception, think again.

There is hardly room behind the podium for all the lawmen trying to get a piece of this one. There are the prosecutors.

Then there are agents from the FBI and the Secret Service, and there are men from the U. S. Justice Department's computer crime unit.

Obermaier tells the press corps all about the crimes. He tells them the boys' intrusions have cost companies thousands of dollars in security personnel salaries and lost processing time. But he doesn't tell them that the dangerous hackers are, in effect, just a bunch of teenage boys who got to be friends because they shared a hobby. He doesn't mention the long nights in Eli's bedroom, doesn't talk about any of their inside jokes, doesn't say "Plik" once. After Obermaier finishes his speech, the questioning does not go the way you'd expect.

"The indictment says they sold TRW credit reports. So how much did they get?" asks a reporter in the front row.

"Several hundred dollars. " Obermaier declines to be more specific.

"Where do the damages come in?" someone asks.

Fishbein explains that the phone companies and Tymnet had to spend a lot of money to fix security holes.

"Isn't that like charging the burglar for the bars you buy to put up on your windows?" someone else asks. It's fair game, Fishbein says, because of the huge number of billable hours the victim companies burned patching up after the kids were through there.

The reporter from the New York Post shrugs. His newspaper is a tabloid, the feistiest in town, and he came here in the misguided hope that this would be a hot story. He's been at this job for a long time. He's covered organized crime and organized crime doesn't look like this. He's covered conspiracies, and they don't act like this. These are just kids. There are no bodies, there is no sex, and the crime, if there is one, will be very hard to explain in the small amount of space he'll get.

After the reporters file out, the room is pretty empty. It's just a dingy lobby again. Except for one thing. In the back, way behind the last row of folding chairs, stands Mark.

He's the defendant, and here he is listening to the prosecutors announce his capture. Rarely does the accused appear at the prosecutors' media briefing.