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You look amazing.”
She answered, “You look amazing, too.”
What a boost to my ego! No one had ever said anything like that to me before, not even Bonnie. And certainly not an extremely hot chick like this one, with a body, face, and hair that made me picture her on stage in a casino somewhere, strutting in high heels and a skimpy costume. Or half a costume.
She was pumping on a StairMaster 6000, hard enough to work up a sweat. I climbed onto the one adjacent and struck up a conversation. She was friendly enough to give me hope. It didn’t last. She said she was a dancer with Siegfried and Roy—that pair of famous magicians who were doing large-scale illusions and working with live tigers in their act.
Wouldn’t I love to know how they did some of their tricks! Any magician would. I started asking questions. She gave me this cold “fuck you” look and said, “I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. I can’t tell you anything.” She was nice about it, but firm. The “Go away” message was all too clear.
Damn.
My cell phone rang, providing a handy escape from the embarrassment. “Hey, Kevin,” the voice said.
“Hi, Adam.” My half-brother—the person in the world I was closest to who wasn’t a hacker. In fact, he didn’t even use a computer.
After we had chatted for a bit, he said, “An ex-girlfriend of mine knows this big superhacker named Eric Heinz. She says he knows some phone company stuff you might not know about, and he told her he really needs to talk to you.”
And then he said, “Be careful, Kevin. I don’t think this girl is trustworthy.”
My first reaction to Adam’s call was to blow off the whole thing—just not follow up. I’d had enough problems even hacking with guys I had known for years and felt I could trust.
But resisting temptation had never been one of my virtues. I called the number Adam had given me.
The phone was answered not by Eric but by a guy who said his name was Henry Spiegel, which he pronounced “Shpeegel.” Spiegel was one of the most colorful characters I’ve ever run across, and my list includes, besides Ivan Boesky, people like famed palimony attorney Marvin Mitchelson, convicted of tax evasion, and ZZZZ Best scammer Barry Minkow. Spiegel was a case all his own, a guy who had a reputation for being on the periphery of everything from bank robbery to porno to ownership of a hot new Hollywood nightclub, one of those written-about places where young actors and wannabes line up outside every night.
When I asked Spiegel to put Eric on the phone, he said, “I’ll get him for you. I’ll have to page him and then conference you in. He’s really cautious.”
“Cautious”? I was cautious; this guy sounded way beyond that, more like superparanoid.
I waited. What was I doing, anyway? If this guy was really into hacking, even talking to him on the phone was a bad idea for me. The terms of my release said I couldn’t have any contact with hackers, and associating with De Payne was risky enough. One word from this Eric Heinz guy could be enough to send me back to a prison cell for up to another two years. Except for the Novatel cell phone hack, I had been mostly playing by the rules for the two years I had been back on the street. I had only another year of supervised release left. So why had I made this call?
Here I was, getting in touch with Eric while telling myself I was doing it out of courtesy to my half-brother.
How could I have known that this one innocent call would be the beginning of an insane adventure that would change my life forever?
When Eric came on the phone that first time, he busied himself by dropping enough hints to make sure I understood he knew a lot about phone phreaking and computer hacking.
He said something like, “I’ve been working with Kevin. You know—the other one, Kevin Poulsen.” He was trying to build cred with me on the shoulders of a hacker who had just been busted for rigging radio contests and supposedly stealing national security secrets.
He told me, “I’ve been on break-ins to telco offices with him.” If it was true that he had been inside telephone company offices, that was really interesting. It meant Eric had inside information from actually using and controlling the equipment in central offices and other telco facilities. So he definitely had my attention. Eric’s claim of knowing a bunch of Poulsen’s tactics was good bait.
To set the hook, he sprinkled his gab with details about phone company switches like the 1AESS, 5E, and DMS-100, and talked about systems like COSMOS, Mizar, LMOS, and the BANCS network, which he said he and Poulsen had accessed remotely. I could tell he wasn’t just bluffing his way through: he knew more than a little about how the systems worked. And he made it sound like he had been part of the small team that had worked with Poulsen to rig those radio contests, which newspaper articles said Poulsen had won a couple of Porsches from.
We talked for about ten minutes. Over the next week or so, I called Spiegel a few more times for conversations with Eric.
A couple of things nagged at my gut. Eric didn’t talk like other hackers; he sounded more like Joe Friday, like a cop. He asked questions like, “What projects have you been up to lately? Who are you talking with these days?”
Asking a hacker that kind of stuff was a little like going into a bar where bank robbers hung out and saying to one of them, “Ernie sent me. Who’d you pull your last job with?”
I told him, “I’m not hacking anymore.”
“Neither am I,” he said.
This was pretty much the standard cover-your-ass line with somebody you didn’t know. Of course he was lying, and he meant for me to know it. He must have figured I was lying, too. In my case, the statement was pretty much true. But, thanks to this guy, it wouldn’t be for long.
I told him, “There’s a friend of mine I think you’d like to talk to. His name is Bob. What number should I have him call you at?”
“Tell him to call Henry the same way you just did,” he said. “He’ll conference me in again.”
“Bob” was my on-the-spur-of-the-moment alias for Lewis De Payne.
It would have been hard to find another hacker with Eric’s inside information. Yes, I was drawing Lewis even deeper into my hacking, but with him acting as my front guy, I could find out what information Eric had that Lewis and I didn’t, while still protecting myself.
Why was I willing to be tempted into exchanging information with Eric, when for me to even talk with him violated my terms of release? Think of it like this: I was living in Las Vegas, a city I didn’t know well and didn’t much like. I kept driving past the gaudy hotels and casinos, all tarted up to draw the tourists and gamblers. For me this was no fun-town. There was no sunshine in my life, none of the thrill and intellectual challenge I’d experienced when hacking into the phone companies. None of that adrenaline flow from finding software flaws that would let me electronically march right into a company’s network—the rush I’d felt back in the days when I was known in the online underworld as “Condor,” my hacker handle. (I had originally chosen that name out of admiration for a character who was a particular hero of mine, the one-step-ahead-of-everybody guy played by Robert Redford in the movie Three Days of the Condor.)
And now the Probation Department had assigned me a new Probation Officer, somebody who seemed to think I had gotten too many breaks and needed to be taught some lessons. He had called up a company that was in the process of hiring me and asked questions like “Will Kevin have access to company funds?” even though I had never made a penny from hacking, despite how easy it would have been. That pissed me off.
I got the job anyway. But every day, before I left, they searched me for external media like floppy disks and mag tapes. Just me, nobody else. I hated that.
After five months, I completed a huge programming assignment and was laid off. I wasn’t sorry to leave.
But finding a new job proved a challenge, since the same Probation Officer kept calling every prospective employer and asking those alarming questions of his: “Will he have access to any financial information?” and so on.
That left me depressed as well as unemployed.
The two or three hours a day that I spent at the gym stretched my muscles but not my mind. I signed up for a computer programming class and a nutrition class (because I was trying to learn more about living a healthy lifestyle) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In my first week there, I powered the workstation off and on while constantly typing “Control-C,” which broke the computer out of its boot-up script and gave me administrative privileges, or “root.” Minutes later an administrator came running into the room, shouting, “What are you doing?!”
I smiled at him. “I found a bug. And look, I got root.”
He ordered me out and told my Probation Officer I had been on the Internet, which wasn’t true but gave them enough of an excuse to force me to pack up and drop out of all programming classes.
Years later I would learn that a system admin at the university had sent a message to a guy by the name of Tsutomu Shimomura under the subject line “About our friend,” describing this incident. Shimomura figures heavily in the final chapters of this story, but I was stunned when I discovered that he had been snooping into what I was up to as early as this, at a time when we had had no contact and I didn’t even know he existed.
Though booted from the programming course at UNLV, I aced the nutrition class, then switched to Clark County Community College, where tuition was cheaper for residents. This time I took courses in advanced electronics, as well as a writing course.
Classes might have been more of an attraction if the girl students had been pretty enough or lively enough to get my juices flowing a little faster, but this was community college night school. If I wanted to meet more showgirls, it wasn’t going to be in a classroom at night.
When depressed, I turn to things that give me pleasure. Doesn’t everyone?
With Eric, something interesting had dropped into my lap. Something that might offer a much greater test of my abilities. Something that might get my adrenaline pumping again.
The hard truth is that there wouldn’t be any story to write if I hadn’t overcome my unhappiness about Lewis and filled him in on my conversation with Eric. He was all for it, eager to sound out this guy and see if he seemed to be on the level.
Lewis phoned me back the next day to say that he had contacted Spiegel and talked to Eric. He seemed surprised to admit he had liked the guy.
Even more, he agreed with me that Eric, as he put it, “seems to know a lot of stuff about Pacific Bell’s internal processes and switches. He could be a valuable resource.” Lewis thought we ought to get together with him.
I was about to play the first move of what would turn into an elaborate cat-and-mouse game—one that would put me at high risk and demand every ounce of my ingenuity.