Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (55 page)

At the same time we’re on the phone, I’m bustling around the small apartment trying to get out of sight anything that could be a problem. I shut down and unplug my computer. No time to wipe the hard drive. And the laptop is still warm from being used. I hide one cell phone under the bed, the other in my gym bag. Mom tells me to call Aunt Chickie and find out what she recommends.

Chickie gives me the home phone number of John Yzurdiaga, the attorney I’ve been working with since the Calabasas search.

Now the knocking starts again, with demands that I open up.

I yell, “I’m sleeping—what do you want?”

The voice calls back, “We want to ask you a few questions.”

Trying to sound as indignant as I can manage, I shout,
“Come back tomorrow when I’m awake!”

They’re not going to go away. Is there any chance I can convince them I’m not the guy they’re looking for?

Several minutes later, I call my mom back and tell her, “I’m going to open the door. Stay on the phone with me.”

I crack the door open. The guy who has been calling to me is maybe in his late thirties, black, with a graying beard.

It’s the middle of the night, and he’s wearing a suit—I figure he must really be FBI. In time I’ll learn he’s Levord Burns, the guy in charge of this operation. The door is barely open, but it’s enough for him to stick his foot out and block me from slamming it closed. Several others follow, pushing their way into the room.

“Are you Kevin Mitnick?”

“I already told you I’m not.”

Another agent, Daniel Glasgow, starts in on me. He’s somewhat older, bulky, with graying hair. “Hang up the phone,” he says.

I tell my mom, “I gotta go.”

Some of the guys have started searching.

I ask, “Do you have a search warrant?”

“If you’re Kevin Mitnick, we have an arrest warrant,” Burns says.

I tell him, “I want to call my attorney.”

The agents make no move to stop me.

I call Yzurdiaga. “Hey, John, this is Thomas Case, I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina. The FBI has just showed up at my door. They think I’m some guy named Mitnick, and they’re going through my apartment, but they haven’t shown me a search warrant. Can you talk to them?”

I pass the phone to the agent standing in my face, Glasgow. He takes the phone and starts demanding to know who’s on the other end of the line. I think Yzurdiaga doesn’t want to identify himself because he knows I’m using a phony name, and that might raise some ethical issues for him.

Glasgow passes the phone to Burns. Now I know who’s in charge.

I can hear Yzurdiaga telling him, “If you show my client a valid warrant, you’re good to search.”

They finish the call. Everybody is searching the apartment.

Burns asks me for ID. I pull out my wallet and show him my G. Thomas Case driver’s license.

One searcher comes into the room and shows Burns the cell phone he’s just found under my bed.

Burns, in the meantime, is pawing through my gym bag and finally comes up with the other cell phone. At this point, cell phone time still costs about a buck a minute, so the fact that I own
two
phones can’t help but raise suspicions.

Burns asks me for my cell phone number. I say nothing. I’m hoping he’ll turn the phone on. It’s a trap I’ve set in case something like this ever happened: unless you enter a secret code within sixty seconds of powering up, all of the phone’s memory, including the programmed mobile number and ESN, will be erased. Poof! There goes the evidence.

Damn! He just hands it off to another agent without powering it up.

Again I demand, “Where’s your search warrant?!”

Burns reaches into a folder and hands me a paper.

I look at it and say, “This isn’t a valid warrant. There’s no address.” From my reading of law books, I know that the United States Constitution forbids general searches; a warrant is valid only if it is specific and precise about the address to be searched.

They go back to searching. Like an actor, I put myself in the mindset of someone being violated. I get loud: “You don’t have any right to be here. Get outta my apartment. You don’t have a search warrant. Get outta my apartment
NOW!
”

A few agents form a circle around me. One of the agents shoves a sheet of paper at me. He says, “Doesn’t this look like you?”

I can’t help smiling to myself. The U.S. Marshals Service has put out a wanted poster on me. Unbelievable!

It says:

But the picture on it is the one taken more than six years ago at the FBI offices in Los Angeles, the same one the
New York Times
used, from back when I was way heavier and grubby-looking from not having showered or shaved for three days.

I tell the agent, “That doesn’t look like me at all.”

Running through my mind is the thought,
They’re not sure. Maybe I really
can
get out of this
.

Burns leaves the apartment.

Two guys go back to searching. The other pair stand around watching; when I ask, one of them tells me they’re locals from the Raleigh-Durham Fugitive Task Force. What, the Feds thought three of their own weren’t enough to take down one nonviolent hacker?

Agent Glasgow has glommed onto my briefcase. It’s filled with papers documenting all my different identities, blank birth certificates, and the like—a one-way ticket to prison. He puts it down on the little dining table and opens it.

I shout,
“Hey!”
and the instant he looks up, I slam the cover shut, flip the latch down and press, spinning the combination wheels and locking the case.

He shouts at me,
“You better open that!”

I pay no attention. He steps into the kitchen, pulls open some drawers, finds a big carving knife, and comes back in with it.

His face has turned a dark shade of red.

He goes to stab the knife into the briefcase, to cut it open. Another agent, Lathell Thomas, grabs his arm. Everyone else in the room knows that if Glasgow had cut open the briefcase in the absence of a valid search warrant, anything found inside might be ruled inadmissible.

Agent Burns has been gone for half an hour. Now he comes back and hands me a different warrant, all typed out and signed by a Federal judge but with my address written in by hand. By now the other two agents have already been searching—illegally—for more than two hours.

Agent Thomas starts to search my closet. I try to shout him away, but he ignores me and opens the door. After a while, he turns around, holding up a wallet.

“Well, well, whadda we have here?!” he says with a distinctly Southern drawl.

He starts pulling out driver’s licenses in all the earlier names I’ve used. The others stop what they’re doing to look.

“Who’s Eric Weiss?” he asks. “Who’s Michael Stanfill?”

I want to grab everything out of his hands, but I’m afraid it might look as if I were attacking him—not a good idea in a roomful of guys with pistols.

Now they know I’m not just a clean, hardworking citizen. But they’ve come to arrest Kevin Mitnick, and there’s nothing in the wallet that will help them pin that on me.

Evidently I’ve been playing my part so convincingly—the private citizen irate at being unfairly harassed—that they’re now discussing whether they should take me downtown and fingerprint me to prove I really
am
Mitnick and just trying to pull a fast one on them.

I say, “That’s a good idea. What time do you want me to be at your office in the morning?”

They ignore me. Now all three of the Feds go back to searching.

So far my luck is still holding out.

And then it happens: Thomas is going through all the clothes in my closet. He’s searching my old ski jacket.

From a zippered inner pocket, he pulls out a piece of paper.

“A pay stub,” he announces. “Made out to Kevin Mitnick.”

Agent Thomas shouts,
“You’re under arrest!”

Not like on television: no one bothers to read me my Miranda rights.

I’ve been so careful, and now a pay stub from a company I worked at briefly after leaving Beit T’Shuvah, hidden away for years in an overlooked inner pocket of that ski jacket, has been my undoing.

I can taste bile in my throat and can’t even get to a sink to spit. I tell the agents I need to take my gastric reflux medicine. They look at the label and see that it’s been prescribed by a doctor. But they refuse to let me take one.

Incredibly, I’ve held them at bay for three and a half hours. And I’ve been hiding in plain sight for nearly three years, with the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and Secret Service all looking for me.

But now it’s over.

Agent Thomas glares at me and says, “Mitnick, the jig is up!”

Rather than handcuffing me behind my back, the deputy U.S. Marshal puts me in cuffs, a belly chain, and leg irons. They walk me out the door. And I know at that moment that I’m not going away for just a short time.

M
y new home was the Wake County Jail in downtown Raleigh, which offered a decidedly different form of Southern hospitality. As I was being booked, the Federal agents gave strict orders again and again and again that I was not to be allowed anywhere near a phone.

I asked every uniform going past my cell to let me call my family. They all might as well have been deaf.

But one jailer seemed to be a little more sympathetic. I gave her a story about how I needed to call my family to arrange bail. She took pity on me and after a short while moved me to a cell with a telephone.

My first call was to my mom; Gram had driven over so the two of them could worry about me together. They were both in a highly emotional state, very upset and distraught. How many times had I done this to them, bringing such pain into their lives because their son/grandson was going back to prison, perhaps for a very long time.

After that I called De Payne. Since all calls from jail cells are monitored, I couldn’t say very much.

“Yes, hello?” mumbled a sleepy Lewis De Payne. It was around 1:00 a.m. California time, the morning of February 15, 1995.

“This is a collect call,” said the operator. “Caller, what’s your name?”

“Kevin.”

“Will you accept the charges?”

“Yeah,” said De Payne.

“I just was arrested by the FBI tonight. I’m in jail in Raleigh, North Carolina. I just thought you ought to know,” I told my coconspirator.

He didn’t need me to spell out that he had to go into immediate cleanup mode once again.

The next morning I’m taken to court for my first appearance, still in the black sweats I wore to go to the gym some twelve hours ago, on my last night of freedom.

I’m stunned to see that the courtroom is buzzing and packed, with every seat filled. It seems like half the people in there have either a camera or a reporter’s pad. It’s a media circus. You’d think the Feds had caught Manuel Noriega.

My gaze settles on a man standing near the front of the courtroom, a man I have never met in person but immediately recognize: Tsutomu Shimomura. The FBI might never have caught me if he hadn’t become irate enough about the break-in to his servers to drop everything else and lead the parade to find me.

He glares at me.

He and his girlfriend are giving me the eagle eye, especially the lady. John Markoff starts scribbling.

The hearing lasts only a few minutes, ending with an order from the Magistrate that I be held without bail. And once again, that I be held without access to a telephone.

I can’t stand the thought: I’m headed back to solitary.

As I’m being led out in handcuffs, I pass Shimmy. He’s won. Fair and square. I nod to him and figuratively tip my hat: “I respect your skills,” I tell him.

Shimmy returns the nod.

Coming out of the courthouse in chains, I hear shouts of
“Hey, Kev!”
I look up to the balcony, where what seems like a hundred paparazzi are aiming their cameras at me and now clicking away, flashbulbs going.
Oh, my God
, I think.
This is a lot bigger than I thought
. I’m beside myself. How did I come to be this much of a story?

Of course I didn’t see it when it was published, but Markoff’s article in the next day’s
New York Times—
even longer than his Independence
Day piece of the year before, and once again on the front page—seemed certain to cement the image of Osama bin Mitnick in the public’s mind. Markoff quoted Kent Walker, the Assistant U.S. Attorney from San Francisco, as saying, “[Mitnick] was arguably the most wanted computer hacker in the world. He allegedly had access to trade secrets worth billions of dollars. He was a very big threat.”