qclgjq’acrjcrlmqnyrcpgursmzyddmbcnngrgmfupceylyk
Even paranoids sometimes have real enemies. One day I had a gut feeling that someone was watching me—or rather, listening to my phone conversations.
The idea had me really fretting. I was panicked about getting a call from my Probation Officer, telling me to come in for one of those visits that would mean I was about to be taken into custody again and shipped back to Federal detention, maybe even put back in solitary confinement. Scary as hell.
Our home phone service was served out of a PacBell central office in Calabasas, which covered a small territory, so if there were any intercepts, I figured I’d likely be the target. I called the CO and got a tech on the line. “Hi,” I said. “This is Terry Atchley, in Security. I think we have some of our equipment over there. We’re short on monitoring equipment, and we need some of our boxes back for another case. Could you walk around the frame and see if you have any of them?” The frame tech asked me what they looked like. Hmm—I didn’t know. I stumbled a bit and said, “It depends on the model that’s being used over there. It’s probably a small box with a miniature printer attached that’s recording the digits dialed.”
He went to look. I was nervous as hell, pacing as I waited for him to come back to the phone. I was praying he wouldn’t find anything.
Finally he came back on the line. “Yeah,” he said. My heart started beating faster, adrenaline pumping through my veins.
“I found three of your boxes. They’re small gray boxes, but as far as I could see, they don’t have printers,” the tech said.
Three boxes—probably one for each of the phone lines at the apartment I was sharing with my dad. Fuck! This was not good.
“Okay,” I told him. “If we don’t still need them there, somebody’ll come by and pick them up tomorrow. I need you to trace out the connections.”
“On which one?”
“Let’s try the first one.”
The tech asked me which side to trace. Another uh-oh—again I didn’t know how to answer. He told me the box had two connections. “Let’s trace out both and see where they go,” I said.
After several anxious minutes of waiting, I heard him come back on the line. “I had to trace this thing across the frame,” he said. I recognized that for what it was: an annoyed complaint that I had made him chase wires a considerable distance through a complicated maze running along the main distribution frame. He also told me, “On one side, I just hear a thousand-cycle tone.” That was weird. “On the other, I get a dial tone.”
But I wouldn’t be able to understand how these boxes worked until I knew what they were connected to. I asked him to disconnect the cables from the frame and do an LV—a line verification—to find out what phone numbers were connected to each side of the box. “Okay, give me a few minutes,” he said.
Doing line verifications was a routine task. The tech would simply lift each cable pair one at a time, clip his lineman’s handset to the pair, and dial the code to determine each phone number.
The thousand-cycle tone didn’t make sense. Intriguing. I had no idea what it meant but didn’t have time to dwell on the question. My heart was racing, I was sweating with fear, knowing he was going to read me one of my dad’s phone numbers.
He finally came back on the line and gave me the two phone numbers connected to one of the boxes. Neither of them belonging to Dad.
I let out a silent sigh. I could finally breathe again. It was as if a ton of bricks had been lifted off my chest.
But what about the other two boxes? The tech sounded just a bit annoyed when I told him I needed the other two traced, as well. Still, he wasn’t going to make trouble for himself by complaining out loud. Though the wait this time was much longer, he finally came back and gave me the numbers that were connected to the other two boxes. Again, none were for any of my dad’s lines.
No one was checking up on me.
I could hardly wait for the next step: calling both numbers assigned to each box.
First I tried one of the thousand-cycle numbers. It rang three times and then answered with a beep-beep-beep. I tried again. And again. No matter what time I called, always the same thing. What could this be? Maybe it was waiting for some type of code. Whatever the explanation, it was obvious to me that it wasn’t the line being wiretapped.
I was going to enjoy exploring and finding out this number’s secret.
The other number connected to the first box was answered with just a “Hello”—which had to be the person being intercepted. Just out of curiosity, I called the Mechanized Loop Assignment Center to learn who the unfortunate victim of the intercept was.
It wasn’t a Mr. or Mrs. Somebody; it was a company called Teltec Investigations. I tried the lines on the second box, and then the third. All three were for the same company, Teltec Investigations.
That evening over dinner I mentioned to my dad that I had checked to see if our phone lines were being wiretapped. He rolled his eyes. I could imagine what he was thinking: My son must be living in a James Bond fantasy world to think anybody would bother wiretapping him. That’s the kind of stuff that only happens in spy movies.
I tried to convince him it was a serious possibility though there was no need to worry. There really were wiretaps in the neighborhood, but they were on some company called Teltec Investigations, not on us.
I smiled to let him know there was nothing to be concerned about. He looked at me in surprise. “Teltec?!”
I nodded.
In another of those small-world coincidences, my dad knew about Teltec, which, he explained, was a PI firm—a company employing private investigators and skip tracers who tracked down the assets of business partners who’d squirreled away more than their share of the profits, men who were getting divorced and had tons of cash in hidden bank accounts, and so on. And, “I know Mark Kasden, the manager there,” my father told me. Then he added, “How about if I give him a call? I bet he’ll want to know what you found out.”
I said, “Why not?” I thought the guy would appreciate the information.
Twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the apartment door. Kasden hadn’t wasted any time coming over. Dad let him in and introduced us. The guy was short and stocky but muscled, with a bit of a ponytail that looked like it was maybe meant to distract you from noticing that he was balding on top. He didn’t look anything like my idea of a Sam Spade or Anthony Pellicano, though I’d find out later that he was one of those avid Harley owners who talked about their bikes with great affection. And he was always on the hunt for chicks, focused on his next conquest.
I looked at this guy and wondered why his firm was being investigated, though I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to share anything incriminating with me. I explained I had checked to see if my dad’s phone lines were being tapped.
“They aren’t,” I told him, “but three lines at Teltec are being monitored.”
His reaction was pretty much like my father’s. He looked like he was thinking, This kid is full of it. No way he’d be able to find out if a phone line was being wiretapped. I was excited to share my capabilities. It was cool because ordinarily this was stuff you had to keep to yourself unless you wanted to end up in a dormitory at a prison camp.
“You don’t think I could find wiretaps? Just using my computer and any telephone, I can monitor anyone I want.”
The look on his face said, Why am I wasting time with this blowhard?
I asked if he wanted a demonstration. He replied with a skeptical, cocky, “Sure. Let’s see if you can listen to my girlfriend’s line.” She lived in Agoura Hills, he told me.
In my notebook I had handwritten notes of the dial-up numbers for the SAS remote access test points (RATPs) in several COs in the San Fernando Valley. I looked up the number for the RATP in the Agoura CO that served her area. There were four numbers listed.
Since I knew my dad’s lines didn’t have any intercepts on them, I could use one of them to dial in to SAS: because it was a local call, no billing record would be generated, meaning no evidence could be found later showing that anybody had ever dialed SAS from this line. I sat down at a desktop computer—which was actually my friend’s, though my dad had agreed to say it was his if a Probation Officer ever dropped by, since I wasn’t supposed to use computers except with prior approval. I used the computer modem to dial in to the SAS unit in the Agoura CO.
On the second one of my dad’s lines, I called another number and put the phone in speakerphone mode. They heard the ring, ring, ring.
Then I typed some commands on the computer. All of a sudden, the ringing stopped with a loud click, as if someone had picked up the phone. They watched, intrigued, as I hummed loudly into the speakerphone: mmmmmmmmm. Immediately, we heard a series of touch tones as if someone picked up the line and started to initiate a call.
I asked Mark for his girlfriend’s phone number as I entered a series of commands on the computer. We were now listening on the girlfriend’s phone line.
Bummer. She wasn’t on the phone. The line was silent.
“Mark, your girlfriend’s not on the line,” I told him. “Try calling her from your cell phone.” As he took out his cell phone and speed-dialed the number, my dad was giving me a look of disbelief, as if he were watching some Harry Houdini wannabe trying to perform a magic trick he didn’t really know how to do.
From the speakerphone on my dad’s phone line, we heard the brrrrr-brrrr that meant the number was ringing. After four rings, we heard an answering machine pick up, then the girlfriend’s outgoing message. “Leave a message,” I told him with a big grin. As he talked into his cell phone, we could hear his words coming out over my dad’s speakerphone.
Mark’s jaw dropped. His eyes widened and locked on mine with a look of awe and admiration. “That’s fucking incredible,” he said. “How did you do that?!”
I replied with what has since become a tired cliché: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
On his way out, he said, “I think you’ll be hearing from me.” The idea of working for a PI firm sounded fantastic. Maybe I could learn some great new investigative techniques. I watched him walk out the door and hoped I really would hear from him again.