Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker (15 page)

Weeks later, my mom, who then worked at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, saw McNichol having lunch at one of the tables. Mom introduced herself and said, “Kevin Mitnick is my son.”

McNichol immediately said, “Yeah, what’s all this about his turning off my phones?” She said that nothing like that had ever happened to her, and she herself wondered, just as I had, how the rumor had gotten started. Later a private investigator would confirm that none of it had taken place.

When people ask me why I ran, years later, instead of facing the Federal charges against me, I think back on moments like this. What good would it do for me to come clean if my accusers were going to play dirty? When there’s no presumption of fair treatment, and the government is willing to base its charges on superstition and unverified rumors,
the only smart response is to run!

When it was his turn to present my case, my court-appointed attorney told the magistrate that I had indeed gone to Israel in late 1984, but
that I hadn’t been absconding, just visiting. I was stunned. We had discussed this point ten minutes before my hearing, and I’d explained that I hadn’t been outside the country in years and had in fact never been overseas. Mom, Gram, and Bonnie all looked shocked because they knew that what he was saying just wasn’t true. How could an attorney be so incompetent?

In a last-ditch effort to frighten the magistrate, Leon Weidman made one of the most outrageous statements that have probably ever been uttered by a Federal prosecutor in court: he told Magistrate Tassopulos that I could start a nuclear holocaust. “He can whistle into a telephone and launch a nuclear missile from NORAD,” he said. Where could he have possibly come up with that ridiculous notion? NORAD computers aren’t even connected to the outside world. And they obviously don’t use the public telephone lines for issuing launch commands.

His other claims, every single one of which was false, were tall tales, likely picked up from bogus media reports and who knows what other sources. But I had never heard this NORAD one before, not even in a science-fiction story. I can only think he picked up the notion from the Hollywood hit movie
WarGames
. (Later it would become widely accepted that
WarGames
was partly based on my exploits; it wasn’t.)

Prosecutor Weidman was painting a portrait of me as the Lex Luthor of the computer world (which I guess made him Superman!). The whistling-into-the-phone thing was so farfetched that I actually laughed out loud when he said it, certain that Her Honor would tell the man he was being absurd.

Instead, she ordered me held without bail because when “armed with a keyboard” (
“armed”!
), I posed a danger to the community.

And she added that I was to be held where I would not have any access to a telephone. The living areas assigned to a prison’s “general population” have phones that inmates can use to make collect calls. There is only one area with no phone access at all: solitary confinement, known as “the hole.”

In
Time
magazine’s issue of January 9, 1989, an item under the heading of “Technology” noted: “Even the most dangerous criminal suspects are usually allowed access to a telephone, but not Kevin Mitnick—or at least not without being under a guard’s eye. And then he is permitted to call only his wife, mother and lawyer. The reason is that putting a phone
in Mitnick’s hands is like giving a gun to a hit man. The twenty-five-year-old sometime college student is accused by Federal officials of using the phone system to become one of the most formidable computer break-in artists of all time.”

“Like giving a gun to a hit man”—said of a guy whose only weapons were computer code and social engineering!

I would have another chance to plead my case. The hearing before a magistrate concerns only the initial decision about detention. In the Federal system, you then “go to the wheel,” and a Federal judge is assigned to your case at random (thus “the wheel”). I was told I was lucky to get Judge Mariana Pfaelzer. Not quite.

The new attorney who had been assigned to me, Alan Rubin, tried to argue that I shouldn’t be housed in solitary confinement, which was intended for inmates who committed violent acts in prison or were a threat to the prison itself. Judge Pfaelzer said, “That’s exactly where he belongs.”

Now I was taken to the brand-new, just-opened Federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, where I was escorted up to the eighth floor, Unit 8 North, and introduced to my new home, a space about eight feet by ten, dimly lit, with one narrow vertical slit of a window through which I could see cars, the train station, people walking around free, and the Metro Plaza hotel, in which, seedy though it probably was, I longed to be. I couldn’t even see the guards or other prisoners, since I was closed in not by bars but by a steel door with a slot that my food trays were slid through.

The loneliness was mind-numbing. Prisoners who have to stay in the hole for extended periods often lose contact with reality. Some never recover, living the rest of their lives in a dim never-never-land, unable to function in society, unable to hold a job. To get an idea of what it’s like, picture being trapped for twenty-three hours a day in a closet lit by only a single forty-watt bulb.

Whenever I left my cell, even to walk just ten feet to the shower, I had to be shackled in leg irons and handcuffs, treated the same way as a prisoner who had violently assaulted a guard. For “exercise,” I would be shuffled once a day to a kind of outdoor cage, not much more than twice
the size of my cell, where for an hour I could breathe fresh air and do a few push-ups.

How did I survive? Visits from my mom, dad, grandmother, and wife were all I had to look forward to. Keeping my mind active was my salvation. Since I wasn’t in the hole for violating prison rules, the strict guidelines for prisoners in solitary were relaxed a little for me. I could read books and magazines, write letters, listen to my Walkman radio (favorites: KNX 1070 News radio and classic rock). But writing was difficult because I was allowed only a short pencil, too stubby to use for more than a few minutes at a time.

But even in solitary, in spite of the court’s best efforts, I managed to do a bit of phone phreaking. I was allowed phone calls to my attorney, my mom, my dad, and Aunt Chickie, as well as to Bonnie, but only when she was at home at her apartment, not at work. Sometimes I’d long to talk to her during the day. In order to make a call, I had to be shackled and walked to a hallway that had a bank of three pay phones. The guard would take the restraints off once we reached the phone area, and would sit in a chair five feet away, facing the wall of phones.

Calling anyone not listed in the court order would seem impossible, short of trying to bribe the guard—and I knew that would be a shortcut to getting the few privileges I did have revoked.

But wasn’t there some way I could call Bonnie at work? I concocted a plan. It would take balls, but what did I have to lose? I was already in solitary confinement, a supposed threat to national security. I was already at the bottom of the barrel.

I told the guard, “I want to call my mother,” and he looked up the number in the logbook. He walked the few steps, dialed the phone, and handed it to me. The operator came on and asked my name, then went off the line until my mom answered and agreed to accept a collect call from Kevin, and we were finally connected.

As I was talking with Mom, I would frequently rub my back against the pay phone as if I had an itch. At the end of our conversation, I would then put one hand behind my back, acting like I was scratching my back. With my hand still behind me, while continuing to talk as if carrying on a conversation, I would hold down the switch hook for a few seconds to disconnect the call. Then I would bring my hand back around in front of my body.

I knew I had only eighteen seconds to dial a new number before the phone would start emitting a loud, fast busy signal that the guard would surely be able to hear.

So I’d reach behind my back again and pretend to scratch, while I very quickly dialed whatever number I wanted to call—beginning with 0 to make it a collect call. I would pace back and forth while scratching my back, so the guard would get used to this action and not think it was suspicious.

Of course, I couldn’t see the dial pad, so I had to be sure to get the numbers right without having to look. And I had to hold the phone tightly against my ear to mask the sound of the touch tones as I redialed.

All the while, I had to act as if I were still talking to my mother. So I would nod and appear to be holding a conversation with her, as the guard watched.

After I punched in the new number, I had to time my fake conversation just right, so that when the operator came on and said, “Collect call. Who shall I say is the caller?” the next word I said would be “Kevin”—in a sentence that would sound normal to the guard. (As the operator asked my name, I’d be saying something like, “Well, tell Uncle John that…” The operator would stop talking and wait for me to give my name, just as I was saying “… KEVIN… sends my best.”)

When I heard Bonnie’s voice, my heart soared. It took willpower to control myself, forcing myself to talk with no more animation than when I really was talking to my mother.

It had worked. I was as excited as if I’d just succeeded with some epic hack.

The first time is the hardest. I kept up that routine day after day. It’s a wonder the guard didn’t buy me some lotion for itchy skin.

One night a couple of weeks after I began doing this trick, when I was sleeping, my cell door slid open. Standing there were a bunch of suits: a couple of associate wardens and the captain of the detention center. I was handcuffed, shackled, and hustled off to a conference room thirty feet away. I sat down, and one of the associate wardens asked, “Mitnick, how are you doing it? How are you redialing the phone?” I
played dumb, thinking it would be stupid to admit anything. Let them prove it.

The captain chimed in, “We’ve been monitoring your calls. How are you dialing the phone? The CO [Correctional Officer] is watching you at all times.” I smiled and said, “I’m not David Copperfield—how could I possibly redial the phone? The officer never takes his eyes off me.”

Two days later, I heard noises outside my room. It was a Pacific Bell technician. What the hell? He was installing a phone jack in the hallway across from my cell and the next time I asked to make a phone call, I found out why: the guard brought a phone with a twenty-foot handset cord and plugged it into the jack, dialed the authorized number I requested, and then passed the handset through the slot in the heavy metal door to my cell. The phone itself was far beyond my reach. Bastards!

Besides taking my phone calls, Bonnie was also very supportive in person. Three times a week after work, she’d make the long drive to the prison and wait in line for a
very
long time for her turn to see me in the visiting room, with guards watching us the whole time. We were allowed a brief hug and quick kiss. Over and over, I would earnestly reassure her that this was the last time I would ever do anything like this. As in the past, I really believed it.

I continued to sit in solitary while attorney Alan Rubin negotiated with the prosecutor about the terms of a plea bargain that would let me get out of prison without a trial. I was being charged with breaking into DEC and possessing MCI access codes, causing DEC a loss of $4 million—an absurd claim. Digital’s actual losses were related to the investigation of the incident; the $4 million figure was an arbitrary number chosen for the purpose of sentencing me to a lengthy prison term under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. My punishment should really have been based on the cost of the licensing fees I hadn’t paid for the source code I’d copied, which would have been much, much less.

Still, I wanted to settle the case and get out of my coffinlike cell as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to stand trial because I knew the Feds had easily enough evidence to convict me: they had my notes and disks,
they had Lenny’s eagerness to testify against me, they had the tape from a body wire Lenny had worn during our last hacking session.

At last my attorney worked out a deal with the Federal prosecutors that would result in my serving a one-year prison term. They also wanted me to testify against Lenny. That came as a shock, since I’d always heard that the guy who squealed first would get off easy, maybe without even doing any time at all. But the Feds now wanted to nail their own snitch, and my former friend. Sure, I said. Lenny had given evidence against me, so why shouldn’t I pay him back in kind?

But when we got into court, Judge Pfaelzer apparently was influenced by the many rumors and false allegations that had piled up against me over time. She rejected the plea agreement, deeming it too lenient. Still, she allowed a revised version that gave me one year in jail, followed by six months in a halfway house. I was also required to sit down with DEC’s Andy Goldstein to tell him how we’d hacked into DEC and copied its most coveted source code.

As soon as I said I would accept a plea agreement, I magically lost my “national security threat” status. I was transferred from solitary into the general population. At first it felt almost as good as being released, but then reality quickly reminded me that I was still in jail.

While I was in the general population at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a fellow prisoner, a Colombian drug lord, offered to pay me $5 million cash if I could hack into Sentry, the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ computer system, and get him released. I played along to keep on friendly terms with him, but I had absolutely no intention of going down that road.