Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (12 page)

Sheila was the assistant principal at the high school where John's mom worked, and John had hung out there a lot in the afternoons while he was in elementary school. John liked Sheila's computer. It was an Apple II, and it was the first computer he'd ever seen. How did it work? John wanted to know. The case was a glorious gray-brown molded plastic, embossed with a rainbow apple logo. Today it would look clunky. Then it looked as sleek as any sports car. The Apple II changed the world because it made desktop computing accessible. It really did all the things that everyone told you a home computer could do: write letters, balance the checkbook, draw pictures. John loved the subtle resistance of its keys beneath his fingers, the march of the cursor across the green screen.

The Apple II no more resembled the other computers on the market than a lion resembled a litter of tabbies. There was a lot of cheaper stuff out there

a choice of a Timex Sinclair 1000, a Texas Instruments. TI-99/4a, a VIC 20, a Tandy TRS-80

but you got what you paid for. An Apple cost a thousand dollars or more three months' rent. You could buy a car for

that kind of money, although you couldn't travel as far in a car.

Maybe because the Apple was the only one out there built by a hacker, it was also the only one with a top that would flip open to show you the guts of the thing. It was like looking under a hood, but with an engine a hundred times cooler. You could get expansion cards for the Apple, which meant that you could build on to it, make it faster. You could double the width of the 40-column screen, making it as wide as a full page. The machine was accessible to a ten-year-old kid sitting in a quiet school office long after all the students went home. Within an hour, John had figured out how to start drawing pictures on the screen. The only sound, besides the satisfying click of the keyboard, was the movie-set loud ticking of the oversize school clock on the wall.

Sheila taught BASIC to John. He wrote simple lines of code at first. It was a solitary pursuit, but the class clown didn't tire of it. The machine was like a permanent audience. Tell it what you wanted, find the right words, and it spit back a response that was better than applause.

John lashed together his first program. He told the computer to type his name: J O H N L E E.

There it was, across the screen. Hit the execute key and see it again: J O H N L E E. Yeah. Again.

It needed something. A little flourish.

He added a bell character to the program.

So now it went J O H N LE E... DING!

He loved the ding. It was a celebration, of his name and of his power.

Again.

Sometimes Sheila would invite him to her brownstone in Park Slope, a part of Brooklyn that John's mom couldn't afford to live in. Sheila always let him play on the computer, and he fooled around with a program called Eliza, an application that made the computer act like a person. It was really fun to watch the computer carry on a conversation, playing the role of a Freudian therapist.

John typed: Hello, my name is John Lee.

The computer typed: HOW ARE YOU JOHN?

Fine.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO TALK ABOUT TODAY?

What's new?

WHATEVER YOU SAY.

What do you say?

MAYBE YOU SHOULD CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE.

How?

WHAT IS IT THAT YOU REALLY WANT TO ASK?

How should I change my attitude?

IT APPEARS THAT WE ARE ALIKE IN MANY WAYS.

How am I like you?

OH, YOU ARE LIKE ME IN SOME WAY, NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK.

Am I like a computer?

ARE YOU FRIGHTENED BY MACHINES?

Not at all.

TRY TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR TRUE FEELINGS, JOHN.

How did it work? John wanted to know. Sheila told him it was one of the first programs to demonstrate something called artificial intelligence. The program could "parse" sentences, tearing the words apart and looking for key words.

HOW ARE YOU, JOHN? Fine, I guess.

FINE? HOW SO? PLEASE ELUCIDATE YOUR THOUGHTS.

Oh, the thoughts John could elucidate. Where would he start? With school, where it was boring and where they were always bossing him around? Or with the places where he'd been living? Their apartments were always located in some of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn, so dangerous his mom wouldn't even let him play out on the street.

Or maybe the Freudian Eliza would prefer him to elucidate about his father.

He could tell the computer about how his dad didn't live with John and Larraine, never had. He could tell about how his dad once brought him a hand-held pinball machine and another time took him to an amusement park for the day. And about how everyone said John was just like him, had the same wonderful hearty laugh.

And what would the computer say?

John could tell the computer that he hadn't seen his dad in a couple of years, not since the time Larraine told him to stay away. Having him breeze in with jokes and presents left Larraine looking like the heavy. John might tell the computer that it was okay. He told that to everyone else, told them he hardly even thought about his dad.

John and his mom moved around Brooklyn a lot. They lived in Red Hook, by the projects, for a while. Clinton, Brownsville, Fort Greene. In Crown Heights, they lived at the corner of Franklin and Utica, and they wondered why so many people came in the front hallway to push money through the slot in the landlord's door, the same slot where they paid rent every month. Crack, somebody told John one day. The word was unfamiliar, it was a new word in the mid-1980s. But the tone was old, and soon they moved again.

For his birthday in sixth grade, John's mom bought him a Commodore 64. What else? At $299, it was still too expensive.

John's mom had saved for months and he knew why

they had talked about how to save the money, even came up with

a plan. But he still was surprised that she actually bought it. And on the morning she gave it to him, he hugged her and yelled, "Oh Mom, I love you!"

John took a test at the end of sixth grade, and miraculously it showed that he was working at an eighth-grade level. This surprised the teachers, since John was the kind of student whose average dropped from 95 at the beginning of the year to 55 by the end. He took another test at the end of eighth grade, which he was barely passing. And guess what? He scored about as high as anybody in the whole city. It enabled him to enroll in one of the most prestigious public high schools in New York City, Stuyvesant, across the river in Manhattan. It's nothing for Stuyvesant High School to turn out kids headed to Harvard, to Yale, then on to federal judgeships. When alumnus Antonin Scalia got nominated to the Supreme Court just before John got to Stuyvesant, school officials issued a proud but understated press release. They had expected no less from a Stuyvesant boy.

What did they expect of John at school? He didn't know. He didn't care. He was there, but he wasn't. He understood everything he heard in class, but it just didn't have much to do with his real life. Drafting class was fun, because he liked to draw, and because he and the teacher had a one-joke relationship based on the teacher's willingness to do a (bad) imitation of the rappers Run DMC. But for the most part, high school just seemed like a silly diversion from John's real life on the street.

The Decepticons hung out in front of the stoic brick projects sandwiched in between crack-cap-strewn Fort Greene Park and the deteriorating Brooklyn Navy Yard. John knew that you had to belong to something, and the Decepts looked out for you so you didn't get robbed as often. The gang took its name from Saturday cartoons, a show called "The Transformers. " Transformers were trucks that turned into fighting robots. John was a transformer himself. He transformed into a Stuyvesant student every morning. He transformed into a street kid every night.

John didn't think it was a really tough gang, because they were not into drugs. And hardly any murders had been pinned on them. Decepticons were just into the usual stuff, really. You hung out in front of the bodegas in the neighborhood. You told girls, "Hey, I'm a Decept. " Or if you met someone, and he said, "Who are you, man?" you said, "I'm a Decept, " and he said, "I used to be a Decept, too. " Then you knew he was OK. That's how it worked on the street.

It was weird trying to integrate the two components of John's life

street life and school life. They were like two halves of

a life, and they allowed him to have different personalities. One was gregarious, quick-witted, and funny, helping some kid at school learn to use a computer. Another personality got a rush from thinking about how a counterman looked when you walked into his bodega and told him to empty the cash register.

John didn't meet a lot of Decepts at Stuyvesant. He didn't meet a lot of calculus students under the broken streetlights at the Raymond Ingersoll Houses. John never once doubted that he'd go to college. He thought, I can pull a robbery, go to jail for a year, and then go to college. Sometimes he didn't know who he was.

One lesson that stuck with him: John and a friend were on the J train in Manhattan, near the Delancey stop under the Lower East Side. The tracks are dug under the Bowery, where the bums used to loll around the pawnshops and cheap-beer bars. John's friend got into a staring contest with some guy across the aisle in the train, one of those situations that everyone except teenage boys tried to avoid.

"What are you staring at?" the guy across the aisle blurted.

"Absolutely nothing, " said John's friend.

Then the guy across the aisle shoved his hand into his waistband, as if he was about to pull out a gun. John's friend jumped up and walked into the next car, then all the way to the front of the train until he found a transit cop. The train was clattering and rocking, the lights blinking on and off as if there was an earthquake. He brought back the cop, pointed, and said, "This guy says he has a gun. "

The cop frisked the indignant rider, who was clean. The cop glared at John's friend, then left the car. At the next stop, John's friend followed the unarmed guy into the station and started beating on him.

John heard his friend say, "What you say you got a gun for, man? You would've killed me if you really had one. Next time you better have one. "

Here was a lesson more relevant than anything John learned at Stuyvesant. Authority figures were just units in the great system that is life. They were individual lines of code, and if you used them in the right way, you could get a predictable response. Power was something you could borrow.

John knew a place where it was easy to get money. Back by this Brooklyn street mall, Albee Square, a raucous place where hawkers press half-off come-ons into your palms. Fayva Shoes. Burger King. A Stetson hat store that now mostly sells Kangol caps. Cheap gold ID bracelets, your initials in crass block letters. Behind long collapsible tables, solemn Muslims robed in white sit burning incense, selling fragrances in colored vials.

Nearby, under the ramp to the Manhattan Bridge, was a whorehouse, a full-service whorehouse where working men could cash their paychecks and, if they were lucky, even come home with the change.

If they were unlucky, they ran into a Decept with a gun. John had one, a small. 25-caliber pistol with a tiny clip. He got it from a friend who brought it from California, along with a sawed-off pistol-grip shotgun. John and a partner would rob the men coming out of the whorehouse. They would pick a guy wearing a wedding ring. What was he going to do, call the cops? "Officer, I was stuck up while leaving this whorehouse. " No way. John and his partner would approach quietly, they didn't want to scare him, and then John would jump right in his face and say, "Give me all your money right now!"

Sometimes the guy was too scared to hand over his money, and John would have to pat him down, take his wallet.

One cold winter night, they stuck up some married guy and what did they get? Pesos. They were looking at the pesos, wondering what the hell, when a police car pulled up, and they were busted.

John's mom was very upset, even after he told her that he found the pesos on the street and was just asking the guy how much they were worth. The judge wasn't buying any, even though the victim didn't show up to press charges. The judge looked at John standing before the bench, and John could tell he didn't believe the pesos story.

Here's what the judge said: "A Stuyvesant High School student has no business being involved in that situation. "

For some reason, John started to think that day about the computer that had been sitting in his bedroom since sixth grade. A Stuyvesant student shouldn't be in a situation like this. It wasn't leading anywhere, not anywhere he wanted to go. He knew now that he couldn't control things on the street. He was just a component there.

John got an idea. He knew this girl who had a crush on him. Having only twenty dollars, John hit her up for sixty dollars more, and sent her into an electronics store on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The blocks here were thick with these stores, which all had strobe-lit windows displaying last year's whole Sony Walkman line, miniature TVs, row after row of cameras, palm-size video games, answering machines, everything a guy with twenty dollars might lust for. These were the kinds of stores where you had to know what you wanted before you went in, and know your price. John knew both, only he was acting kind of goofy. "You go, " he told the girl, because secretly he was afraid the salesclerk would ask a question he couldn't answer. He didn't want to look ignorant.

He waited outside, pacing a little in front of the window.

The eighty dollars was enough to buy a modem for John's Commie 64. He didn't notice later when the girl got bored and went home. He was too busy trying to connect it.

Why was he so intent? He wanted to be a hacker. He didn't even know why. All he knew was that it was way more interesting than hanging out on the street, robbing people.

On the first day he managed to connect to a bulletin board, a chunky-crude picture of a bear the growling face of a

bear

filled the screen in John's bedroom. He had called Papa Bear's Den, and with a goofy name like that, you know no one from the Legion of Doom was hanging out there. It was more the kind of place where a data processing joe from the post office might log in to feed his computer hobby.