Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (33 page)

Natural instinct told me I should make sure there wasn’t anything going on that I would want to know about before I got there. I just had a gut feeling that something might be up.

In the car, I had a ham radio that I’d modified so I could transmit and receive outside the frequency bands authorized for amateur radio operators. I tuned to one of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s tactical frequencies.

I listened for half an hour or so to pick up the protocol a cop would use when he wanted to ask if there was an outstanding warrant on the guy driving a car he had stopped. He’d say, “I need a 10-28 on license plate ____.”

At the same time, I was taking mental note of the identifiers the cops used when calling Dispatch—for example, “1 George 21.” The Dispatch operator would respond, “Go ahead, 1 George 21.”

What did they say when they were taking time for lunch or whatever? A call would come over the air that included phrases like, “Code 7, Denny’s, Rancho Drive.”

I waited ten minutes, then pressed the Transmit key on my radio, used the same call sign as some cops who were at that moment enjoying lunch at Denny’s, and said, “I need a 10-28 on California license plate…,” and gave my own plate number.

After a moment, the control operator said, “Are you clear 440?”

My heart began racing. What did “440” mean? I had no idea.

I radioed back, “Stand by.”

Using my cloned cell phone, I called the police in the nearby town of Henderson and said, “This is Special Agent Jim Casey, DEA. I’m in Las Vegas with the Multi-Agency Narcotics Task Force. I need to know what ‘440’ means in Las Vegas.”

“That’s a wanted person.”

Oh,
shit!
So “Are you clear 440?” meant “Are you standing away from
the wanted person, so I can tell you what he’s wanted for?” The Las Vegas police were holding a warrant for me that cited my car’s license tags.

If I walked into the Probation Office, it was extremely likely I’d be put in handcuffs and sent back to prison! I felt great relief that I’d dodged that bullet, but I was washed with fear.

I was just coming up on the entry to the Sahara Hotel. I swung into their parking lot, parked, and walked away from the car.

The Sahara. It couldn’t have been any more convenient. My mom happened to be working as a waitress in the coffee shop. I sauntered through the glitz and glitter of the casino, past the eager, quietly rowdy players throwing dice at the craps tables and the hordes of silver-haired, dead-eyed women feeding the slot machines.

I sat at a table until my mom’s shift ended and she could drive me to her house. When I told her and my grandmother that I was very likely on my way back to prison, the family was thrown into turmoil. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a happy, festive occasion, but there was no happiness for us that year, no giving of thanks.

Over the next few days, instead of going into the Probation Office, I made two after-hours phone calls there, leaving messages on the answering machine that I was reporting in by phone because my mom was sick and I couldn’t leave her.

Was my Probation Officer calling them about taking me into custody? I had recognized the synthesized voice on the outgoing message on the Probation Office answering machine, which clued me in about what type of answering machine they had. That manufacturer used “000” as the default code for retrieving messages. I tried and, yes, once again nobody had bothered to change the default code. I called every couple of hours, listening to all the messages. Happily, there were none from my Probation Officer.

My grandmother, my mother, and her boyfriend, Steve Knittle, drove me back to Los Angeles. I certainly wasn’t going to be driving my own car. We arrived late on December 4, the day my travel permit expired. I walked into my apartment with no way of knowing that U.S. Marshal Brian Salt had come by to arrest me early that morning. I stayed for the next three days, scared and anxious, expecting the FBI to show up at any minute, leaving very early every morning, and going to a movie every
night to distract myself. Maybe another guy would have been out drinking and partying all night, but my nerves were shot. I figured these might be my last days of freedom for a while.

But I wasn’t going to leave LA again until my supervised release ended. I had decided if they came for me, so be it—they could take me. But if they didn’t come by the time my supervised release expired, I had decided on my future: I would become someone else and disappear. I would go to live in some other city, far away from California. Kevin Mitnick would be no more.

I tried to think through my plans for going on the run. Where would I live while I set up a phony identity? What city should I pick as my new home? How would I earn a living?

The idea of being far away from my mother and grandmother was devastating to me because I loved them so much. I hated the idea of putting them through any more pain.

At the stroke of midnight on December 7, 1992, my supervised release officially expired.

No call from my Probation Officer, no early-morning raid. What a relief. I was a free man.

Or so I thought.

My mother, grandmother, and Steve had been staying at my cousin Trudy’s. We now switched places, my mother and Steve moving into my place to pack up all my things while I moved in with my grandmother at Trudy’s. No point hanging around the apartment now that my supervised release was up.

People who wear or carry badges sometimes work in mysterious ways. Early on the morning of December 10, three days after my supervised release ended, my mother and Steve were at my apartment in the last stage of packing up my things and making arrangements for moving the furniture. A knock at the door. The minions of law enforcement had finally shown up, a trio of them this time: U.S. Marshal Brian Salt, an FBI agent whose name my mom didn’t catch, and my nemesis, Agent Ken McGuire, whom I had still never seen or met in person. My mother brazenly told them that she and I had had an argument a few days earlier. I had left, she said, and she hadn’t heard from me since and didn’t know where I was. She added, “Kevin’s probation is up.”

When Salt said he had a warrant for my arrest and had left a notice on my door for me to contact him, she told him the truth: “He never saw any notice. He would’ve told me if he had.”

She then had a shouting match with the agents over whether or not my probation was up.

Later she told me she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by them. In her opinion, they were acting like idiots—especially the one who opened the refrigerator and peered inside, as if he thought I might be hiding in there. She had just looked at the agent and laughed at him. (Of course, he might have been checking to see if I had left any doughnuts again.)

They finally went away, empty-handed and with no information.

As far as I was concerned, I was a free man—free to leave Los Angeles before any new charges were filed against me.

But I knew I couldn’t ride back to Las Vegas with my mother. That would be too dangerous; they might be watching her. So Gram offered to drive me back to Vegas after I finished up some business in LA.

One unfinished piece of business was still haunting me. I had conned the DMV into sending me a copy of Eric Heinz’s driver’s license, but I’d used my safety precaution of having the first Kinko’s forward it to a second one—just in case law enforcement had caught on and was staking out the place, waiting for me. Since what I picked up had been faxed twice, the image was so grainy that it hadn’t been much help. I still wanted to get the driver’s license photographs of Wernle, Ways, and Heinz to see if any of them were the same person.

On December 24, Christmas Eve, just before starting to load my things into Gram’s car, I called the DMV posing as Larry Currie, the name of a real investigator with the Los Angeles County Welfare Fraud Unit. Giving that unit’s Requester Code, along with Currie’s PIN, birth date, and driver’s license number, I requested Soundexes on Eric Heinz, Joseph Wernle, and Joseph Ways.

The technician who took my request had been alerted. She notified DMV Senior Special Investigator Ed Loveless, who, according to an official report filed afterward, did a little checking and found that the fax number I’d provided belonged to a Kinko’s in Studio City.

Loveless told the technician to make up a phony Soundex, and she prepared one with a picture of “Annie Driver,” a fictional character the
agency used for instructional purposes. Then Loveless contacted an investigator at the DMV office in Van Nuys and asked her to stake out the Kinko’s location to identify and arrest the person who came in to pick up the fax. The investigator recruited some colleagues to accompany her, and the FBI was notified and agreed to send an agent of its own. All of this was going on when the only thing everybody really wanted was to be at home, getting ready for Christmas Eve.

A few hours after calling to request those Soundexes from the DMV, with my things now packed into my grandmother’s car, we ate lunch with Trudy. I said my good-byes and told her how much I had appreciated being able to stay with her. She and I hadn’t been in close contact, so the favor she’d done me seemed all the more special.

As Gram and I set out, I told her I had a small errand to do that would take me only a minute. We headed for Kinko’s.

By now the four DMV inspectors, dressed as usual in their civilian clothes, were getting impatient. They had been waiting for more than two hours already. The FBI agent detailed to join them had shown up, hung around for a while, and then taken off again.

I directed my grandmother to the Kinko’s, in a strip mall at Laurel Canyon and Ventura, in Studio City (so-called because of the nearby Disney, Warner’s, and Universal lots). I pointed out where I wanted her to park, in a handicapped space outside a supermarket, a couple of hundred feet or so from the Kinko’s. She hung her handicapped placard on the rearview mirror as I got out of the car.

You might expect that Kinko’s would be empty on Christmas Eve. Instead it was as full of people as it would’ve been in the middle of a workday. I waited in line at the fax counter for something like twenty minutes, growing increasingly impatient. My poor grandmother was waiting for me, and I wanted nothing more than to pick up the Soundexes and get out of town.

Finally I just walked behind the counter myself, flipped through the envelopes of incoming faxes, and pulled out the one labeled with my alias, “Larry Curry [which the DMV had misspelled—it was actually “Currie”], Los Angeles County Welfare Fraud.” When I pulled the
sheets out of the manila envelope, I was pissed off: not what I’d asked for, just a picture of a nondescript lady.
What the fuck?
I knew DMV employees could be lazy and incompetent, but this took the cake.
What idiots!
I thought.

I wanted to call the DMV and talk to the stupid technician, but I had left my cell phone in the car. I started pacing back and forth through Kinko’s, trying to decide whether it would be too risky to ask a clerk to use one of the store’s phones, or if I should use the pay phone outside.

I was to learn much later how very curious a scene this must have been for anyone there who noticed: as I paced back and forth staring at the fax and trying to decide what to do, the DMV investigators were following in my footsteps, keeping close behind me. Every time I turned in the opposite direction, they would swing right back into position behind me, as if we were all part of some clown act at the circus.

At last I stepped outside the back entrance, and walked over to the pay phone. As I picked up the receiver and started dialing, I noticed four suits walking out in my direction.

Huh
, I thought. I hadn’t paid for the fax yet, and now there was going to be trouble over the couple of bucks I owed. All four were looking directly at me.

I said, “What do you want?” staring down the woman, who was closest to me.

“DMV investigators—we want to talk to you!”

Dropping the pay phone handset, I called out, “You know what?
I
don’t want to talk to
you!
” while tossing the fax into the air, calculating that one or more of them would go for it.

I was already running through the parking lot. My heart was racing, my adrenaline pumping. I focused all my energy on outrunning my pursuers.

Those many hours I’d spent in the gym, day after day, month after month, paid off. The hundred pounds I had shed made all the difference. I ran north through the parking lot, dashed over a narrow wooden footbridge leading into a residential area dotted with palm trees, and kept running as hard as I could, never looking back. I was expecting to hear a helicopter at any minute. I needed to change my appearance, and quick, so if an air unit was dispatched to search for me, I could slow to a walk and blend in with the normal street traffic.

When I was far enough ahead to be out of my pursuers’ sight, without
slowing I began to shed clothes. Still a gym rat, I was wearing shorts and a gym shirt under my street clothing. I got off my outer shirt and threw it over a hedge as I ran. I ducked down an alley, stepped out of my trousers and dumped them in the bushes in someone’s yard, then started running again.

I kept up the pace for forty-five minutes, until I was sure the DMV agents had given up. Sick to my stomach and feeling as if I might vomit from the exertion, I ducked into a neighborhood bar to rest and catch my breath.

I was happy about my narrow escape but distressed all the same. I found a pay phone in the back of the bar and dialed my own cell phone, still in Gram’s car. I called over and over and over. No answer.