Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker

millions of dollars
in restitution, a
sum that might well be more than I would earn in the rest of my life. And I
would have to assign any profits from telling my story to my hacking
“victims”—Sun, Novell, Motorola, and so on.
John Yzurdiaga and Richard Steingard are two dedicated attorneys, and
they had put in many, many hours defending me pro bono. Nevertheless, I

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had been offered an unbelievably bad deal. Clearly I would either need to
be vigorously defended at trial or work out a better deal with the
government.
The problem was, I was in no financial position to hire an attorney.
Ironically, if I really 
had
been tapping into those 20,000 credit cards before
my arrest, I would’ve been able to afford an attorney who had significant
resources to defend the case at trial or could have punched holes in the
prosecution’s case to get much better settlement terms.
While I was pondering what to do, Bonnie came to visit and to tell me
that Lewis De Payne’s attorney, Richard Sherman, was willing to represent
me for free. She claimed he wanted to help because he didn’t think the
government was prosecuting my case fairly and he believed I needed an
aggressive lawyer.
It sounded good, but I was wary. Sherman wasn’t just Lewis’s lawyer
but also his friend. Still, he came to see me himself and talked convincingly
about winning at trial. After weighing the option of a minimal eight-year
deal and discussing it with my family, I decided to accept Sherman’s offer.
For several weeks he did absolutely nothing on my case except to ask
the court to allow me additional research time in the prison law library, a
request that was summarily denied. The aggressive defense he’d promised
me never materialized. He took my case and basically sat on it.
Soon after he became my attorney of record, I discovered the extent of
the deception. When I called Sherman one day to discuss my case, Ron
Austin answered the phone. I recognized his voice. Austin was the
informant who had recorded my calls for FBI Agent Ken McGuire.
Sherman quickly assured me that Ron didn’t have access to my case
files, but that wasn’t the point. These people weren’t on my side. When I
realized that, I was as livid with Sherman for making an empty promise to
put on a vigorous defense as I was with myself for having believed him.
Sherman, unlike any reasonable lawyer, instead of arguing for my
release, actually demanded that the government indict me: “If you have
something against my client, just indict him, and let’s go to trial,” he
insisted. For a defense attorney to do that seemed outrageous. But that’s
exactly what the government did.
On September 26, 1996, after being held for over a year and a half, I
was indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles on twenty-five charges,
including computer and wire fraud (copying proprietary source code),

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possessing access devices (computer passwords), damaging computers
(inserting backdoors), and intercepting passwords. These were, of course,
added
to the original set of cell phone cloning charges from Raleigh.
For an indigent defendant—which I was—the judge can either direct
that a Federal Public Defender be assigned or turn to the ranks of what are
called “panel attorneys.” These are lawyers in private practice who take on
indigent clients for a fraction of the rate that any well-established attorney
would charge (at the time, the rate for panel attorneys was sixty dollars an
hour). A panel attorney, Donald Randolph, was selected to handle my
defense, and the new charges would be heard by Judge William Keller—
referred to around the courthouse as “Killer Keller” because, courthouse
regulars said, a defendant unfortunate enough to suffer a conviction in his
courtroom, or even one who pled guilty, could expect the maximum
sentence. Killer Keller was the Central District of California’s “hanging
judge.” He was every defendant’s worst nightmare.
But I got a huge break. My other cases were being heard by Judge
Mariana Pfaelzer, the same judge who had been responsible for my being
held in solitary for over eight months, but at least she didn’t have as scary a
reputation as Killer Keller. I really dodged a bullet there.
Attorney Randolph asked Judge Pfaelzer to have the new case
transferred to her under the “low-number rule” (which allows related cases
to be combined and heard by the judge handling the case with the lowest
docket number—that is, the one assigned at the earliest date). Since the
cases were related, she agreed. Nine months after I was indicted on the
twenty-five counts, the smaller ones—the Raleigh charges and the
supervised-release case—were finally settled. I was sentenced to twenty-
two months. I had already been in custody four months longer than that.
Attorney Randolph made an immediate request for a detention hearing,
since I was now eligible for release on bail. The Supreme Court had held
that every defendant had a right to a bail hearing.
When my attorney told Judge Pfaelzer that he had filed an application
for bail to be heard the following week, the prosecutor objected, calling me
a “flight risk and a danger to the community.” Her Honor said, “I’m not
giving him bail, so there is no need for a hearing…. Take if off calendar.”
This was widely seen as a blatant denial of my constitutional rights.
According to my attorney, no one in the history of the United States had
ever been refused a bail hearing. Not the notorious impostor and escape

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artist Frank Abagnale Jr. Not the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.
Not even the crazed stalker and would-be presidential assassin John
Hinckley Jr.
As if that weren’t bad enough, my situation quickly got much worse. A
defendant has the right to see the evidence the prosecution plans to use
against him at trial. But the government lawyers continually gave reasons in
court for not turning all the evidence over to my attorney. Most of the
discovery was in electronic format—the files seized from my computers,
floppy disks, and unencrypted backup tapes.
My lawyer then asked the judge to allow him to bring a laptop into the
prison visiting area so he could review the electronic evidence with me.
Again Judge Pfaelzer denied the request, adding, “We’re never in the world
going to do that.” She apparently believed that just sitting in front of a
computer, even under my attorney’s supervision, I could somehow cause
great damage. (There was no wireless Internet in 1998, so it would have
been impossible for me to pull an Internet connection out of thin air. But
she simply didn’t know enough about how computers worked to have any
idea whether I could connect to the outside world.) And besides, the
prosecutors kept warning her that I would have access to the victim’s
proprietary source code, or that I might write a computer virus that could
somehow be released into the wild. As a result, we weren’t permitted to
examine any of the electronic evidence against me that was key to the
government’s case. When my attorney asked the judge to order the
government to print out the files, the prosecutor said that there were far too
many of them, so many that they would fill up the entire courtroom, and the
judge refused to order the government to comply.
As word got around about the unfairness of my predicament, Eric
Corley rallied a group of supporters who wrote articles on websites, spread
the word in the online community, passed out fliers, and pasted bright
yellow and black bumper stickers that said “Free Kevin” all over the place.
Eric even sent some to me in custody.
On my thirty-fifth birthday, while I was being detained at the
Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, my supporters wanted to
come visit me, but as a pretrial detainee, I was allowed visits only from my
immediate family and legal counsel.

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When I spoke to Eric on the phone, I told him I would go to the law
library on the third floor of the detention center at exactly 1:30 p.m. Eric
and members of the “Free Kevin” movement located the window and
positioned themselves across the street. Then, when the guards weren’t
looking, I pressed a “Free Kevin” bumper sticker against the window. Eric
snapped a photo that ended up being used on the box cover of his
documentary film about my case,