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

“FBI!”
“You’re under arrest!”
“Hands on the car!”
If Lenny had staged all this just to scare me, I thought, it was an
impressive display.
“You guys aren’t FBI. Show me your ID.”
They pulled out their wallets and flipped them open. FBI badges all
around me. The real thing.
I looked at Lenny. He was dancing in a little circle of joy, as if he were
celebrating some kind of victory over me.
“Lenny, why would you do this to me?”
As an agent handcuffed me, I asked Lenny to call my mom and tell her
I’d been arrested. The bastard didn’t even do that one last small bit of
kindness for me.
I was driven by two agents to the Terminal Island Federal Prison. I had
never seen anything like this outside of a movie or a television show: long
rows of open cells, with guys hanging their arms out of the bars. Just the
sight of it made me feel like I was dreaming, having a nightmare. But the
other prisoners surprised me by being cool and friendly, offering to lend me
some stuff that was sold in the commissary and the like. A lot of them were
white-collar guys.
But I couldn’t shower. I felt disgusting by the time some FBI agents
finally picked me up and took me to FBI headquarters in West Los Angeles,
where they took a mug shot of me. I knew I looked a mess—unshowered,
uncombed, wearing the same clothes I’d been in for three days, and having
slept badly each night on a small cot. At least that picture was to give me
some small comfort at a crucial time later on.
After being held over the weekend, I was taken before Magistrate Venetta
Tassopulos for my initial detention hearing on Monday morning, expecting
to be released on bail. I was assigned a court-appointed lawyer, who asked
if I’d been a fugitive. It turned out he’d already talked to the prosecutor,
who told him I’d fled to Israel back in 1984, which wasn’t true.

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Once the hearing began, I sat there in disbelief as the Court got an earful
from the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Leon Weidman. Weidman told
the judge, “This thing is so massive, we’re just running around trying to
figure out what he did.” Among other things, he said that I had:
hacked into the NSA and obtained classified access codes
disconnected my former Probation Officer’s phone
tampered with a judge’s TRW report after receiving unfavorable
treatment
planted a false news story about Security Pacific National Bank’s
having lost millions of dollars, after I had an employment offer
withdrawn
repeatedly harassed and turned off the phone service of actress
Kristy McNichol
hacked into Police Department computers and erased my prior
arrest records.
Every one of these claims was blatantly false.
The allegation that I had hacked into the NSA was totally ridiculous. On
one of the floppy disks seized by the Santa Cruz police was a file labeled
“NSA.TXT.” It was the “whois” output listing all the registered users of
Dockmaster, the 
unclassified
National Security Agency computer system
that Lenny had social-engineered himself into when he worked at Hughes
Aircraft. Everything in the file was public information, including the lists of
telephone extensions at the National Computer Security Center. The
prosecutor, who obviously didn’t understand what he was looking at, was
characterizing public telephone extensions as “classified access codes.”
Unbelievable.
Another allegation, the claim that I’d hacked into police computers and
deleted my arrest record, was related to my Santa Cruz Operations hacking
case, but the missing record was really law enforcement’s own fault.
Remember, when Bonnie and I surrendered ourselves to the West
Hollywood Sheriff’s Department, because they neglected to fingerprint or

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photograph us, no record was created of our arrest. In short, it was their
own screwup: they didn’t do their job.
All the other allegations were also false, rehashes of rumors that
apparently convinced the magistrate I was a serious threat to national
security.
The one that mystified me most was that I had repeatedly had the phone
service of the actress Kristy McNichol turned off because I had a crush on
her. First of all, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think that turning off
someone’s phone would be a good way to demonstrate affection. I never
understood how the story got started but the experience had been seared
into my memory. I’d had to endure the humiliation of standing in line at the
grocery store and seeing my photo plastered on the cover of the