Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (21 page)

I was going to enjoy exploring and finding out this number’s secret.

The other number connected to the first box was answered with just a “Hello”—which had to be the person being intercepted. Just out of curiosity, I called the Mechanized Loop Assignment Center to learn who the unfortunate victim of the intercept was.

It wasn’t a Mr. or Mrs. Somebody; it was a company called Teltec Investigations. I tried the lines on the second box, and then the third. All three were for the same company, Teltec Investigations.

That evening over dinner I mentioned to my dad that I had checked to see if our phone lines were being wiretapped. He rolled his eyes. I could imagine what he was thinking:
My son must be living in a James Bond fantasy world to think anybody would bother wiretapping him. That’s the kind of stuff that only happens in spy movies
.

I tried to convince him it was a serious possibility though there was no need to worry. There really were wiretaps in the neighborhood, but they were on some company called Teltec Investigations, not on us.

I smiled to let him know there was nothing to be concerned about. He looked at me in surprise. “Teltec?!”

I nodded.

In another of those small-world coincidences, my dad knew about Teltec, which, he explained, was a PI firm—a company employing private investigators and skip tracers who tracked down the assets of business partners who’d squirreled away more than their share of the profits, men who were getting divorced and had tons of cash in hidden bank
accounts, and so on. And, “I know Mark Kasden, the manager there,” my father told me. Then he added, “How about if I give him a call? I bet he’ll want to know what you found out.”

I said, “Why not?” I thought the guy would appreciate the information.

Twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the apartment door. Kasden hadn’t wasted any time coming over. Dad let him in and introduced us. The guy was short and stocky but muscled, with a bit of a ponytail that looked like it was maybe meant to distract you from noticing that he was balding on top. He didn’t look anything like my idea of a Sam Spade or Anthony Pellicano, though I’d find out later that he was one of those avid Harley owners who talked about their bikes with great affection. And he was always on the hunt for chicks, focused on his next conquest.

I looked at this guy and wondered why his firm was being investigated, though I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to share anything incriminating with me. I explained I had checked to see if my dad’s phone lines were being tapped.

“They aren’t,” I told him, “but three lines at Teltec are being monitored.”

His reaction was pretty much like my father’s. He looked like he was thinking,
This kid is full of it. No way he’d be able to find out if a phone line was being wiretapped
. I was excited to share my capabilities. It was cool because ordinarily this was stuff you had to keep to yourself unless you wanted to end up in a dormitory at a prison camp.

“You don’t think I could find wiretaps? Just using my computer and any telephone, I can monitor anyone I want.”

The look on his face said,
Why am I wasting time with this blowhard?

I asked if he wanted a demonstration. He replied with a skeptical, cocky, “Sure. Let’s see if you can listen to my girlfriend’s line.” She lived in Agoura Hills, he told me.

In my notebook I had handwritten notes of the dial-up numbers for the SAS remote access test points (RATPs) in several COs in the San Fernando Valley. I looked up the number for the RATP in the Agoura CO that served her area. There were four numbers listed.

Since I knew my dad’s lines didn’t have any intercepts on them, I could use one of them to dial in to SAS: because it was a local call, no
billing record would be generated, meaning no evidence could be found later showing that anybody had ever dialed SAS from this line. I sat down at a desktop computer—which was actually my friend’s, though my dad had agreed to say it was his if a Probation Officer ever dropped by, since I wasn’t supposed to use computers except with prior approval. I used the computer modem to dial in to the SAS unit in the Agoura CO.

On the second one of my dad’s lines, I called another number and put the phone in speakerphone mode. They heard the
ring, ring, ring
.

Then I typed some commands on the computer. All of a sudden, the ringing stopped with a
loud
click, as if someone had picked up the phone. They watched, intrigued, as I hummed loudly into the speakerphone:
mmmmmmmmm
. Immediately, we heard a series of touch tones as if someone picked up the line and started to initiate a call.

I asked Mark for his girlfriend’s phone number as I entered a series of commands on the computer. We were now listening on the girlfriend’s phone line.

Bummer. She wasn’t on the phone. The line was silent.

“Mark, your girlfriend’s not on the line,” I told him. “Try calling her from your cell phone.” As he took out his cell phone and speed-dialed the number, my dad was giving me a look of disbelief, as if he were watching some Harry Houdini wannabe trying to perform a magic trick he didn’t really know how to do.

From the speakerphone on my dad’s phone line, we heard the
brrrrr-brrrr
that meant the number was ringing. After four rings, we heard an answering machine pick up, then the girlfriend’s outgoing message. “Leave a message,” I told him with a big grin. As he talked into his cell phone, we could hear his words coming out over my dad’s speakerphone.

Mark’s jaw dropped. His eyes widened and locked on mine with a look of awe and admiration. “That’s fucking incredible,” he said. “How did you do that?!”

I replied with what has since become a tired cliché: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

On his way out, he said, “I think you’ll be hearing from me.” The idea of working for a PI firm sounded fantastic. Maybe I could learn some great new investigative techniques. I watched him walk out the door and hoped I really would hear from him again.

A
couple of days after meeting my father’s friend Mark Kasden, from the PI firm, I set out on the long drive back to Vegas to pick up my clothes and personal belongings. The Probation Department had approved my request that I be allowed to move in long-term with my dad.

I left my dad’s at an early hour that didn’t much suit my nocturnal lifestyle but would let me escape LA before the morning rush hour. During the drive, I planned to do a little social engineering to investigate the monitoring boxes I had discovered, the ones I had at first feared were on my dad’s phone lines.

I turned onto the 101 Freeway eastbound toward the I-10, which would take me east through the desert. My cell phone was at hand, as usual cloned to someone else’s phone number.

A funny thing about the freeway. A few weeks earlier, I had been cut off by a guy driving a BMW. Busy talking on his cell phone, he had suddenly switched lanes, swerving within inches of my car, scaring the crap out of me, and only barely missing wiping out both of us.

I’d grabbed my cell phone and made one of my pretexting calls to the DMV, running the BMW’s license plate and getting the owner’s name and address. Then I called an internal department at PacTel Cellular (only two cell phone companies serviced Southern California at the time, so I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right the first time), gave
the guy’s name and address, and found that yes, PacTel Cellular had his account. The lady gave me his cell phone number, and hardly more than five minutes after the jerk had cut me off, I called and got him on the phone. I was still shaking with anger. I shouted,
“Hey, you fucking dick, I’m the guy you fucking cut off five minutes ago and almost killed us both. I’m from the DMV, and if you pull one more stunt like that, we’re going to cancel your driver’s license!”

He must wonder to this day how some other driver on the freeway was able to get his cell phone number. I’d like to think that call scared the shit out of him.

Truth be told, though, that lesson in the dangers of using a cell phone while driving didn’t have much lasting impact on me, either. Once I had left behind the traffic noises and honking horns of the rush-hour freeways and settled in for my drive to Vegas, I was on the phone. My first call was to a number etched in my memory: the one for the Pacific Bell switching center that supported all the switches in the west San Fernando Valley area.

“Canoga Park SCC, this is Bruce,” a tech answered.

“Hi, Bruce,” I said. “This is Tom Bodett, with Engineering in Pasadena.”

The name I’d given was too familiar at the time: Bodett was an author and actor who’d been doing a series of radio ads for Motel 6, signing off with, “This is Tom Bodett, and I’ll leave the light on for you.” I had just tossed off the first name that came into my head. But Bruce didn’t seem to have noticed, so I kept right on. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“Fine, Tom, what do you need?”

“I’m working on an unusual case of trouble out of Calabasas. We’re getting a high-pitched tone—sounds like a thousand cycles. We’re trying to find where the call was originating from. Could you take a look?”

“Sure. What’s your callback number?”

Though Bruce hadn’t recognized my voice, I sure did know who
he
was. He’d been the target of social-engineering scams by me and other phone phreaks for years, and had been stung enough times that he had grown suspicious and protective. So anytime he got a call from somebody
he didn’t know who claimed to be a company employee, he’d ask for a callback number—and it had better be a number he recognized as being internal to Pacific Bell. He’d ring off and dial you back.

Most phone phreaks either don’t bother to set up a callback number or don’t know how. They try to get away with some lamebrained excuse like “I’m just going into a meeting.” But Bruce was hip to all of that, and he wasn’t going to get conned again. So before my call, I had convinced a Pacific Bell employee that I was a company engineer who’d been sent to LA to tackle a technical problem and needed a temporary local phone number. Once that was set up, I put it on call forwarding to my cloned cell phone number of the day. When Bruce called back to the legitimate internal phone number I had given him, it rang through to my cell phone.

“Engineering, this is Tom,” I answered.

“Tom, this is Bruce calling you back.”

“Hey, thanks, Bruce. Could you take a look at this number—880-0653—in the Calabasas switch? And let me have the origination information.” In layman’s terms, I was asking him to trace the call.

“Yeah, one sec,” he said.

I was nervous as hell. If Bruce heard a car horn honking or some other nonoffice-like background noise, I’d be caught out. This was way too important—way too interesting—to screw up. I could hear Bruce typing, and I knew exactly what he was doing: querying the switch to trace the call.

“Tom, okay, the call is coming from the LA70 tandem”—meaning it was a long-distance call, coming from outside the LA area.

Bruce then gave me the detailed trunking information I needed to continue the trace. I also asked him for the number of the switching center that managed the LA70 tandem. My uncanny ability to remember telephone numbers came in handy once again: I didn’t have to scribble the number down with one hand while steering with the other. (In fact, most of the phone numbers and people’s names in this book are the real thing, still imprinted in my memory from as much as twenty years ago.)

At the end of the call, I told him, “Don’t forget me, Bruce. I’ll likely need your help again.” I was hoping he’d remember me the next time and not feel he needed to do that whole callback routine again.

When I called the switching center, the phone was answered, “LA70, this is Mary.”

I said, “Hey, Mary, this is Carl Randolph from Engineering in San Ramon. I have a circuit I’m tracing, and it appears to originate from your office.” Apparently I was on solid ground all around, since Mary didn’t hesitate, asking me for the trunking information. I gave it to her, and she put me on hold while she checked. Since phone phreaks rarely targeted toll switches, she didn’t even bother to verify my identity.

Mary came back on the line. “Carl, I’ve traced the trunk information you gave me. The call originated from the San Francisco 4E.” She gave me the trunking and network information she had found from her trace. I also asked her for the number for that 4E office, which she was kind enough to look up for me.

I was now approaching Interstate 15. My route would take me through the Cajon Pass, running between the San Bernardino Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains, making it likely that any call would be dropped. I would wait until I reached Victorville, on the far side of the pass.

In the meantime, I switched on the car radio and was treated to some favorite oldies from the fifties. “K-Earth-101,” the disk jockey said. “We’re giving away a thousand dollars an hour to lucky caller number seven after you hear the K-Earth jingle—‘the best oldies on the radio.’ ”

Wow! Wouldn’t it be cool to win a grand! But why even bother trying? I had never won any contest I had ever entered. Still, the idea planted itself in my mind and would eventually turn from a fantasy into a temptation.