From Kevin Mitnick: This book is dedicated to my loving mother, Shelly Jaffe, and my grandmother Reba Vartanian, who both sacrificed a great deal for me all my life. No matter what situation I got myself into, my mom and Gram were always there for me, especially in my times of need. This book would not have been possible without my wonderful family, who have given me so much unconditional love and support throughout my life. I am so fortunate to have been raised by such a loving and dedicated mother, whom I also consider my best friend. My mom is such an amazing person. She would give the shirt off her back to help out another person who needed it. My mom truly cares about other people, even to the point of sacrificing her own self-interest much of the time. My Gram is another truly amazing person. She taught me the value of hard work and preparing for the future, by teaching me proper money management like saving for a rainy day. For my entire life, she has been like a second mom to me, giving me so much love and support, and always being there for me regardless of my mischievous adventures.
In December 2008, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer and has been suffering greatly from the effects of chemotherapy and the illness itself. I didn’t realize how much time I had wasted being away from my mom until this tragedy happened. As caring and compassionate people, both my mom and Gram taught me the principles of caring about others and lending a helping hand to the less fortunate. And so, by imitating their pattern of giving and caring, I, in a sense, follow the paths of their lives. I hope they’ll forgive me for dedicating so much time to writing this book, passing up chances to play cards or watch videos with them because of work and deadlines to meet. I still feel deep regret for all the stress, nervousness, and aggravation I caused them while I was involved with my hacking adventures and the aftermath following my arrest. Now that I’ve turned my life around and continue to make positive contributions to the world, I hope this book will bring much happiness to my mother’s and grandmother’s hearts and erase some of the memories of the negative experiences described in these pages.
How I wish my dad, Alan Mitnick, and my half brother, Adam Mitnick, would have lived long enough to break open a bottle of champagne with me on the day my memoir appears in the bookstores. Although my dad and I had a difficult time living together as father and son, we had lots of great times, too, especially taking his boat out for fishing trips in and around the Channel Islands in Oxnard, California. More important, my dad provided me with love and respect and gave me a great deal of support while I was riding the rough road through the Federal criminal justice system. He joined other volunteers from 2600 magazine when they picketed several Federal courthouses to protest the government’s handling of my case. A few weeks before I was released from custody, he suffered a mild heart attack. Tragically, his health rapidly deteriorated after he acquired a serious staph infection during his surgery and then turned out to have lung cancer, as well. He passed away a year and a half after I was released. I didn’t realize how much time I had lost with my father until he wasn’t around anymore.
My aunt Chickie Leventhal has always been there for me, especially when I really needed her most. When FBI agents searched my apartment in Calabasas in late 1992 while I was working for Teltec Investigations, she contacted a close attorney friend of hers, John Yzurdiaga, who generously provided legal advice and eventually represented me pro bono, along with his partner Richard Steingard. Whenever I need advice or a place to stay in Manhattan Beach, she is always there offering her love and support. I cannot forget her longtime boyfriend, Dr. Bob Berkowitz, who has been like an uncle to me, always willing to talk with me whenever I need advice.
My cousin Trudy Spector was so kind and generous in allowing my mom and grandmother to stay in her home whenever they would commute to Los Angeles to visit me. She also allowed me to stay at her place before I decided to disappear after my supervised release had expired. I wish she could have had the opportunity to read these words, but she sadly suffered a serious medical issue and passed away in 2010. I feel a great sense of loss and sadness that I lost such a loving and caring person.
My dear friend Michael Morris has always been a true and loyal friend to my family and me. Thank you, Mike, for all your kind and generous support throughout the years. I know you’ll personally remember a lot of the stories written in these pages. I will always cherish your friendship.
I have had the extraordinary good fortune of being teamed up with bestselling author Bill Simon once again to write my memoir. Bill’s notable skills as a writer include his magical ability to take information provided by me and write it up in such a style and manner that anyone’s grandmother could understand it. Bill has become more than just a business partner in writing; he is also a close friend who has listened to my stories, sometimes several times over to ensure that the story is written with precision. Although we had several moments of frustration and disagreements regarding the inclusion of technical-based hacking stories during the development phase of this book, we always compromised to our mutual satisfaction. In the end, we decided to target a larger readership that didn’t require prerequisite knowledge such as advanced hacking or networking skills. Besides working with Bill Simon, I had the pleasure of teaming up with Donna Beech for some work at the end of the project. It was great working with her.
I’m eager to thank those people who represent my professional career and are dedicated in extraordinary ways. My literary agent, David Fugate of LaunchBooks, spent a great deal of time negotiating the book contract and acting as a liaison with the publisher, Little, Brown. My speaking agent, Amy Gray, with New Leaf Speakers, has represented me for almost a decade. She has thoughtfully and diligently worked with countless clients throughout the world who hired me to keynote at their events. She has done and continues to do an awesome job as my agent. Thank you, Amy. And always remember—Almost Famous ;-)
I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Little, Brown on developing this exciting project. I wish to thank my editor, John Parsley, for all his hard work and great advice on this project. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure meeting you while I was in New York.
I wish to thank my childhood hero Steve Wozniak for spending his valuable time in penning the foreword for my memoir. This is the second foreword that Steve has graciously written for me. The first one was published in The Art of Deception (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2002). I’ll never forget that “getting off supervised release” gift you gave me on The Screen Savers show—a brand-new PowerBook G4. It was an amazing gift that left a smile on my face for months. I always look forward to hanging out with Steve during our travels. We both try to visit the Hard Rock Café in every foreign country we visit and collect the T-shirts. Thank you, Steve, for being such a great friend.
And of course, I have to thank my former girlfriend Darci Wood for all her love, support, and devotion in the time we were together. Unfortunately, sometimes relationships don’t work out for one reason or another. Regardless, it’s comforting to still have Darci as a loyal and trusted friend. Now I just need her to sign a backdated Non-Disclosure Agreement from the day we met and everything will be just fine! Just kidding, Darci. (Or maybe not.)
Jack Biello was a close friend and caring person who spoke out against the extraordinary mistreatment I endured at the hands of journalists and government prosecutors. He was a key voice in the “Free Kevin” movement and a writer who had an extraordinary talent for writing compelling articles exposing information that the government didn’t want people to know about the Kevin Mitnick case. Jack was always there to fearlessly speak out on my behalf and to work together with me preparing speeches and articles. At one point, he even represented me as a media liaison. Jack’s passing, while Bill and I were finishing up the manuscript for The Art of Deception, left me feeling a great sense of loss and sadness. Although it’s been almost nine years now, Jack is always in my thoughts.
Although my friend Alex Kasperavicius was never really a hacker, he was always willing to be brought into my hacking projects, usually to participate in some exciting social-engineering project. Later we developed a social-engineering workshop to help businesses identify and mitigate the risk of social-engineering attacks, and delivered these workshops at businesses around the globe. We even had the honor of training the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) in Oklahoma City. In late 2000, we hosted a popular Internet talk radio show called The Darkside of the Internet on KFI-AM 640 in Los Angeles. Thank you, Alex. You have been a loyal and trusted friend.
Eric Corley (aka Emmanuel Goldstein) has been a friend and supporter for almost two decades. He launched the “Free Kevin” movement in early 1998 after I had been detained for over three years. Eric contributed substantial effort, time, and money in getting the word out during my incarceration in Federal detention. He also created a documentary entitled Freedom Downtime, released in 2001, which documented the “Free Kevin” movement and even won an award for best documentary at a New York film festival. Eric, your kindness, generosity, and friendship mean more to me than words can express. Thank you for everything and for being there for me.
Roy Eskapa has been a dear friend of mine for nearly three decades, after he was appointed by the juvenile court as my psychologist. Roy is a generous and amazing person who loves helping others overcome their addictions and improve their quality of life. His book, The Cure for Alcoholism (BenBella Books, 2008), describes the revolutionary Sinclair treatment method that has been proven to help people overcome their dependency on alcohol.
I want to acknowledge my ex-hacking partner Lewis De Payne for taking the time to refresh my memory on several past hacking adventures that we both participated in. Thank you, Lewis. It has been a long and crazy adventure for both of us and I truly wish you the best.
My close friend Christine Marie assisted me with the initial rough draft of the Afterword included at the end of the book. Thank you, Christine, for your participation and effort.
I wish to thank my close friends Kat and Matt Wagenknecht for working with me to develop the codes that appear at the beginning of each chapter. Great work! Let’s see how many readers are able to solve the puzzles and win some prizes.
For those who love solving puzzles, like I do, there is a new set of harder codes to crack in the paperback edition of this book. I wish to thank Disa Johnson for working with me on developing the new codes, which appear at the beginning of each chapter. Please email me at mitnick@gmail.com if you’re able to solve them all.
I wish to thank Jari Tomminen for allowing me to use a photo he had taken of me in Helsinki, Finland, for the Ghost in the Wires book jacket.
I want to acknowledge my friend and security expert David Kennedy, who was kind enough to review a section of this book and provide me with good advice.
Thank you, Alan Luckow, for allowing me to include in my book a picture of the drawing you made, which was on the gift wrapping that covered the box that contained the Apple PowerBook G4 that Steve Wozniak gave me on The Screen Savers show.
Thanks to the social-networking site Twitter, I was able to find a few volunteers willing to take some photographs for the book. I wish to thank Nick Arnott, Shellee Hale, John Lester, aka Count Zero, Michelle Tackabery, and several others for their kind contributions and for volunteering their time. For those of you who wish to follow me on Twitter, please visit twitter.com/kevinmitnick.
I want to thank my former Federal prosecutor, David Schindler, who was kind enough to take the time to allow me to interview him for my book.
I also wish to thank Justin Petersen, aka Eric Heinz, and Ronald Mark Austin, who were kind enough to allow me to interview them for my book. A short time after Bill Simon and I interviewed Justin Petersen, he was found deceased in his apartment in West Hollywood, possibly because of a drug overdose. It’s a shame he suffered the same fate as my brother, who had me initiate contact with Petersen when Justin was using the alias Eric Heinz.
And as I write these acknowledgments, I realize I have so many people to thank and to express appreciation to for offering their love, friendship, and support. I cannot begin to remember the names of all the kind and generous people I’ve met in recent years, but suffice it to say, I would need a flash drive to store them all. There have been so many people from all over the world who have written me words of encouragement, praise, and support. These words have meant a great deal to me, especially during the times I needed it most.
I’m especially thankful to 2600 and all my supporters who stood by me and spent their valuable time and energy getting the word out to anyone who would listen, voicing their concern over and objections to my unfair treatment and the hyperbole created by those who sought to profit from the “Myth of Kevin Mitnick.”
I’ve had too many experiences with lawyers, but I am eager to express my thanks to the lawyers who, during the years of my negative interactions with the criminal justice system, stepped up and offered to help me when I was in desperate need. I have come to respect, admire, and appreciate the kindness and generosity of spirit given to me so freely by so many. I wish to thank Greg Aclin, Fran Campbell, Robert Carmer, Debbie Drooz, John Dusenbury, Sherman Ellison, Omar Figueroa, Jim French, Carolyn Hagin, Rob Hale, Barry Langberg, David Mahler, Ralph Peretz, Michelle Carswell Pritchard, Donald C. Randolph, Tony Serra, Skip Slates, Richard Steingard, the Honorable Robert Talcott, Barry Tarlow, Gregory Vinson, and John Yzurdiaga.
From Bill Simon: In my Acknowledgments for The Art of Deception, I wrote about Kevin that “this is not a work of fiction, although the central figure could be one I might invent for a screenplay thriller. I built for this one-of-a-kind coauthor a very healthy respect.” And I commented that “his working style differs from mine so radically that one might wonder how we could have coauthored a book and come out planning to do other projects together. We have both stretched and learned and found pleasure in the intensely hard work of turning his knowledge and experiences into a fun read.” Though this, our third book together, has been by far the hardest on our friendship, I’m happy to report that the friendship and mutual respect survived and strengthened despite the sandpaper frictions of the process. I expect that this book will last a long time; I expect our friendship will last as long or even longer.
It would be hard to beat the talents of John Parsley as an editor. Supportive but demanding, bringing out the best, always there when you need him. John’s guidance has made this a better book, and I’m in his debt. His estimable chief copyeditor, Peggy Freudenthal, proved to be a champion—putting up with a challenging task, performing peerlessly, and never losing her cool; Kevin and I are both indebted to her.
It’s never easy to finish a book without having my wife and companion of so many years, the multitalented Arynne Simon, supporting me, cheering me on, making me work just a little harder on finding the right phrase. But her smiles still keep me going.
Agents Bill Gladstone and David Fugate both had a hand in making this project come together. A tip of the hat to you both.
In addition to the input from Kevin, I’m grateful to those others who helped fill in parts of the story—in particular Kevin’s mother, Shelly Jaffe, and his grandmother Reba Vartanian; his ex, Bonnie; Assistant U.S. Attorney David Schindler; Kevin Poulsen; former Pacific Bell Security Investigator Darrell Santos; former Detective, now Chief David Simon, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (and my twin brother). The book is richer for their willingness to share. But I especially want to acknowledge the late Justin Petersen, aka Eric Heinz, who was forthcoming in ways that went beyond my expectations.
I especially want to recognize Sheldon Bermont for his contributions to this book. And to grandchildren Vincent and Elena Bermont, whose smiles and enthusiasms have helped keep me in a happy mood.
Finally—last mentioned, a place of honor—I extend a deep bow to Charlotte Schwartz, who makes all the difference.