ow gw ty kc qb eb nm ht ud pc iy ty ik tu zo dp gl qt hd
Early in January 1992, my father called from Los Angeles to say he was worried about my half-brother, Adam, his only other child. I had always been envious of Adam’s relationship with our father, since I had seen my dad only intermittently in the first years of my growing up.
Adam had been living with our dad in Calabasas, near Los Angeles, while he took a prelaw program at Pierce College. He hadn’t come home the night before, which my father said wasn’t like him. I tried to offer reassurance, but what could I say when I really didn’t know anything about the situation?
Dad’s concern turned out to be appropriate. For several miserable days, he was beside himself at hearing no word from Adam. I tried to console and reassure him while I made anxious calls to Uncle Mitchell and Adam’s friend Kent and paged Adam himself over and over and over.
A few days later my dad called, sobbing and distraught. He had just gotten a phone call from the police. They had found Adam, in the passenger seat of his car, parked at a major druggie hangout, Echo Park. He was dead of a drug overdose.
Though Adam and I had grown up separately, in different cities except for a short period when we both lived with our father in Atlanta, in the last couple of years we had grown very close, half-brothers who had become closer than many blood brothers. When I had first started getting to know him in Los Angeles, I couldn’t stand any of the music he cared about—rap and hip-hop, anything by 2 Live Crew, Dr. Dre, or N.W.A. But the more of it I heard when we were together, the more it grew on me, and music became part of the bond that drew us to each other.
And now he was gone.
My father and I had had an up-and-down relationship, but I felt he needed me now. I got in touch with my Probation Officer and gained permission to return to LA for a time to help my dad cope with Adam’s death and work his way out of the depression he seemed to be in, even though I knew that this would heighten my own sadness. A day later I was in my car, heading west on I-15 out of the desert for the five-hour pull to Los Angeles.
The drive gave me time to think. Adam’s death just didn’t seem to make sense. Like a lot of kids, he had gone through a rebellious period. At one point he had dressed to emulate his favorite “Goth” bands and was really embarrassing to even be seen with in public. He wasn’t getting along with our dad at all then, and had moved in with my mom and me for a while. But more recently, in college, he seemed to have found himself. Even if he used drugs recreationally, it just didn’t make sense to me that he would have overdosed. I had seen him recently, and there hadn’t been anything in his behavior that even hinted at his being an addict. And my dad had told me that the cops hadn’t found any needle marks when they discovered Adam’s body.
Driving into the night to join my father, I began to think about whether I might be able to use my hacking skills to find out who Adam had been with that night and where he had been.
Late in the evening after the dull drive from Las Vegas, I pulled up at my dad’s apartment on Las Virgenes Road in the town of Calabasas, about forty-five minutes up the coast from Santa Monica and a dozen miles inland from the ocean. I found him absolutely devastated about Adam, harboring a suspicion of foul play. The normal routine of Dad’s life—running his general contracting business, watching the TV news, reading the newspaper over breakfast, taking trips to the Channel Islands to go boating, going to occasional synagogue services—was torn apart. I knew my moving in with him would pose challenges—he was never an easy man to deal with—but I wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. He needed me.
When he opened the door to greet me, I was shocked by how distraught he looked, how gray his face was. He was an emotional wreck. Balding now, clean-shaven and of medium build, he seemed suddenly shrunken.
The cops had already told him, “This isn’t the kind of case we investigate.”
But they had found that Adam’s shoes were tied as if by a person facing him, not the way he would have tied them by himself. And closer examination had revealed one needle puncture in his right arm, which would make sense only if someone else had given him the fatal dose: he was right-handed, so it would have been entirely unnatural for him to inject himself using his left hand. It was clear he had been with someone else when he died—someone who had given him the fatal hit, either bad dope or way too much, then dumped his body in his car, driven it to a seedy, drug-infested part of Los Angeles, and split.
If the cops weren’t going to do anything, I would have to be the vigilante investigator.
I took over Adam’s old room and dived into researching the phone company records. My best guesses were the two people I had been calling when I first heard from Dad: Adam’s closest friend, Kent, whom he was supposed to be with on his last weekend; and, unhappily, my uncle Mitchell, who had already destroyed his own life with dope. Adam had become very close to Uncle Mitchell. My dad had a hunch that Mitchell had played a role in Adam’s death, maybe even been responsible for it.
At the funeral, the viewing took place in a separate room. I went in alone and found Adam laid out in an open coffin. Being at the funeral of someone close to me was a new and emotionally difficult experience. I remember how different he looked—unrecognizable. I just kept hoping that I was trapped in some sort of cruel nightmare. I was alone in a room with my only brother, and I would never again be able to speak with him. It’s a cliché, I know, but my sadness made me realize how little time we really have in this life.
One of my first tasks in LA was to contact the Probation Officer to whom my case had been transferred, Frank Gulla. Late fortyish, with a medium build and a friendly, calm personality, he was even relaxed about the rules—for example, not insisting on our “required” monthly visits after he got to know me. When I would finally get around to showing up at his office, he’d have me fill out the monthly reports that I had missed, and we’d backdate them. I don’t suppose he was that lax with guys charged with more serious crimes, but I appreciated his being so casual with me.
I threw myself into the investigation. Dad and I both suspected Adam’s friend Kent knew more than he was telling us. Was he perhaps relieving his conscience by opening up to other people? If so, was he careless enough to do it over the telephone? With my friend Alex, I drove to Long Beach, where Kent lived. After a little snooping at a nearby apartment complex, I found what I needed: a phone line not currently wired to the phone of any customer. One call to the local CO was all it took to get a tech to “punch down” a connection from Kent’s line to the unused phone line, turning it, in effect, into a secret extension of his phone. Alex and I set up a voice-activated tape recorder inside the phone company’s terminal box to capture every word spoken on both ends of Kent’s calls.
For the next several days, I made the hour-and-a-half trek from my dad’s place to the apartment building with the hidden recorder in Long Beach. Each time I’d retrieve the previous day’s tape, replace it with a fresh one, and pop the microcassette into my portable tape player to listen to Kent’s conversations as I drove back to Dad’s. In vain. Hours and hours of effort, and nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile I was also piecing together a picture of people Uncle Mitchell had been talking to in the hours before Adam’s death. I was able to social-engineer employees at PacTel Cellular and get his call detail records, hoping these would show me whether Mitchell had been making calls one after another, suggesting a sense of urgency or panic, or calls to other friends he might have been asking for help.
Nothing.
I tried PacTel Cellular again, hoping to find out which cell phone sites Mitchell’s calls had been relayed through, which might show whether he had been near Echo Park, where Adam’s body had been abandoned. But I couldn’t find anyone who knew how to access the records I wanted. Either PacTel wasn’t storing that data, or I just wasn’t managing to find the people who knew which system had access to the database it was in and how to retrieve it.
All in a good but ultimately worthless cause, I had slipped back into my full-blown hacker way of life.
My road had come to a dead end. I had tried every tactic I knew and gotten nowhere: I didn’t have much more insight into Adam’s death than I’d had when my father first called me about it. I was angry and frustrated, miserable at not being able to give my father and myself the satisfaction of having discovered at least some morsels of useful information.
Closure to this sad episode would come only many years later.
My dad stopped talking to Mitchell, convinced he was responsible for Adam’s death. The two brothers would not speak to each other again until the very end of my father’s life, when he was suffering the ravages of lung cancer.
As I write this, Uncle Mitchell has just died. At the family gathering, one of his ex-wives took me aside. In embarrassment, she said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time. Mitchell wasn’t a nice man. The night that Adam died, Mitchell called me. He was so upset I could hardly understand him. He said he and Adam had been shooting up together and Adam had gotten too big a dose and keeled over. Mitchell panicked. He shook Adam, he put him in the shower, but nothing helped.
“He called me to ask for help. I refused to be involved. So he called a drug dealer he knew, who helped get Adam’s shoes on and carry the body into Adam’s car. They drove in two cars to Echo Park, left Adam dead in his car, and drove away.”
So my father had been right all along. Instead of calling 911, Mitchell had sacrificed a nephew he loved to save his own neck.
I can feel myself getting angry again as I write this.
I had believed all along that Mitchell was somehow involved, yet now, hearing the truth, I felt sick to my stomach that he had been capable of such a thing, and that he had died without ever admitting it. This man whom I had loved and respected and looked up to had not been able, even on his deathbed, to tell me the truth.