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he
knew who
I
was, too:
“Hey, Mitnick,” he said, “how much money did you make hacking those
computers?”
“I didn’t do it for the money; I did it for the entertainment,” I replied.
He said something like, “You’re in prison, and you didn’t make any
money. Isn’t that stupid?” Like he was looking down his nose at me. At that
exact moment, I happened to spot a roach floating in his coffee. Smiling, I
pointed at it and said, “This place isn’t like the Helmsley, is it?”
Boesky never answered. He just got up and walked away.
After almost four months at Lompoc, I was coming up for release to the
halfway house, a place called “Beit T’Shuvah.” I was told the name was
Hebrew for “House of Return.” Beit T’Shuvah used the 12-step program,
designed for people with drug, alcohol, and other addictions.
My imminent move to a halfway house was the good news. The bad
news was that a Probation Officer had called Bonnie to make an
appointment to “inspect” the apartment she was then living in, explaining
that he had to approve my future living arrangements before I was released.
For Bonnie, that was the last straw. She felt she had been through enough
and couldn’t dance this dance anymore. “You don’t need to inspect my
apartment,” she told the guy. “My husband won’t be living here.” On her
next visit, she gave me the bad news: she was filing for divorce.
She now says, “It was a very painful time for me. I thought I had failed.
It was scary. I was too afraid to leave Kevin, but too afraid to stay. The fear
of staying just became too big.”
I was stunned. We had been planning to spend the rest of our lives
together, and now she had changed her mind just as I was nearing release. I
felt as if a ton of bricks had been dropped on me. I was really hurt, and
totally shocked.
Bonnie agreed to come to the halfway house for a couple of marriage-
counseling sessions with me. They didn’t help.
I was deeply disappointed about her decision to end our marriage. What
could account for her sudden change of heart? There must be another guy, I
thought—somebody else was in the picture. I figured that by checking out
the messages on her answering machine, I could find out who it was. I felt
bad about doing it, but I needed to know the truth.
I knew Bonnie’s answering machine was a RadioShack product because
I recognized the jingle it played to prompt the caller to leave a message. I
also knew that with this particular machine, you could retrieve messages
remotely, but only if you had the handheld device that came with it, which
emitted a special set of tones to turn on the playback. How could I get
around that and listen to her messages without the remote beeper?
I called a RadioShack store and described the type of answering
machine she had, then added that I had lost my beeper and needed to buy
another. The salesman said there were four possible beepers for the various
models of that particular answering machine—A, B, C, and D—each of
which played a different sequence of tones. I said, “I’m a musician, so I’ve
got a good ear.” He wanted me to come down to the store, but I couldn’t
leave the halfway house because new arrivals weren’t permitted to leave the
premises for the first thirty days they were there. I pleaded with him to open
one of each type, put batteries in the remotes, and then play each remote so
I could hear it.
My persistence paid off: the guy went to the trouble of setting up the
four remotes and playing each of their tones for me. I had a microcassette-
tape recorder running the whole time, pressed to the telephone receiver.
Afterward, I called Bonnie’s phone and played back the tones through
the receiver. The third one did the trick. I heard Bonnie leave a message on
her own phone, presumably from work. After the call had gone to the
machine, some guy in her apartment picked up, and the tape recorded both
sides of their conversation as she told him about “how great it was to spend
time with you.”
Eavesdropping on her messages was a stupid thing for me to do because
it just made the pain I was already feeling that much worse. But it
confirmed my suspicions. I was pretty upset that she had been lying to me. I
was desperate enough to actually consider sneaking out of the halfway
house to see her. Luckily I stopped myself, knowing what a huge mistake
that would be.
After that first month, I was allowed to leave the halfway house for
some selected appointments and visits. I often went to see Bonnie, trying to
win her back. On one of those visits, I noticed that she’d carelessly left her
latest phone bill sitting on the table. It showed that she’d been spending
hours on the phone with Lewis De Payne, who until that moment I’d still
believed was my closest friend.
Well, of course, I had to find out for sure. I casually asked if she ever
heard from any of my buddies, like Lewis.
She lied, flatly denying having ever been in touch with him at all—and
confirming my worst fear. In my mind, she had completely blindsided me.
Where were the faith and trust that I thought I had finally found in her? I
confronted her but got nowhere. I was devastated. Licking my wounds, I
walked out and cut off all contact with her for a long time.
Soon after, she moved in with Lewis. To me it made no sense at all: she
was leaving a guy with a hacking addiction for another guy with the same
propensities. But more important was that Bonnie hadn’t been just my
girlfriend: she had been my wife. And now she’d taken up with my best
friend.
After my release, I traded my hacking addiction for an addiction of a
different kind: I became an obsessive gym rat, working out for hours every
day.
I was also able to find a short-term job as a tech-support person for a
firm called Case Care, but that lasted only three months. When it ended, I
obtained permission from the Probation Office to relocate to Las Vegas,
where my mom had moved and would welcome me living with her until I
could get my own place.
Over a period of months, I dropped a hundred pounds. That put me in
the best shape of my life. And I wasn’t hacking. I was feeling great, and if
you had asked me then, I would have said the hacking days were all behind
me.
That was what I thought.
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