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

Whaaaat?!
Well, maybe there was someone else in the office, and he couldn’t react.
Or maybe it was that arrogance of his, that attitude of superiority, the notion
that he was invulnerable.
I said, “You need to get your floppy disks and notes out of your
apartment and office. Anything to do with SAS, you need to stash
somewhere safe. I’m gonna be doing the same.”
He didn’t seem to think one phone call to the FBI was such a big deal.
“Just do it!”
I told him, trying not to shout.
Common sense dictated my next call, to Pacific Bell’s Customer Name and
Location Bureau. The effort was routine but produced an unexpected result.
A cheerful young lady took my call and asked for my PIN; I used one that I
had nabbed a few months earlier by hacking into the CNL database, then
gave her the two phone numbers in Eric’s apartment.
“The first one, 310 837-5412, is listed to a Joseph Wernle, in Los
Angeles,” she told me. “And it’s non-pub”—short for “non-published,”
meaning a number that the information operator won’t give out. “The
second, 310 837-6420, is also listed to Joseph Wernle, and it’s also non-
pub.” I had her spell the name for me.
So the “Eric Heinz” name was a phony, and his real name was Joseph
Wernle. Or Eric had a roommate… which didn’t actually seem too likely for

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a guy who claimed to have a different sleepover every night. Or maybe he
had just registered the phone under a fake name.
Most likely Eric Heinz was a phony name and Joseph Wernle his real
name. I needed to find out who this guy 
really
was, and I needed to do it
fast
.
Where to start?
The rental application he’d filled out at his apartment complex might
have some background information—references or whatever.
The Oakwood Apartments, where Lewis and I had paid him that surprise
visit, turned out to be just one in a national string of rental properties owned
by a real estate conglomerate. The places were rented to companies putting
employees up on a temporary assignment, or people recently transferred to
a new city and needing a place to live while looking for new digs. Today the
company describes itself as “the world’s largest rental housing solution
company.”
To set things up, I found the fax number for Oakwood’s worldwide
headquarters, then hacked into a phone company switch and temporarily
forwarded the phone line so any incoming fax calls would be transferred to
the fax machine at a Kinko’s in Santa Monica.
On a call to Oakwood’s corporate headquarters, I asked for the name of
a manager, then dialed the rental office at Eric’s building. The call was
answered by a young lady with a pleasant voice and a helpful manner.
Identifying myself as the manager whose name I had gotten, I said, “We’ve
had a legal issue come up about one of the tenants there. I need you to fax
me the rental application for Joseph Wernle.” She said she’d take care of it
right away. I made sure the fax number she had for corporate was the same
one I had just diverted to Kinko’s.
I waited until I thought the fax had been sent, then called the Kinko’s it
was being forwarded to. I told the manager there that I was a supervisor at
another Kinko’s location and explained, “I have a customer here who’s
waiting for a fax. He just realized it was sent to the wrong Kinko’s.” I asked
him to locate the fax and resend it to “my” Kinko’s. This second step would
make it harder for any Feds to unravel my work. I call it “laundering a fax.”
Half an hour later, I stopped by the local Kinko’s and picked up the fax,
paying cash.
But after all that effort, the application didn’t clear up anything. It only
added to the mystery. The owners of corporate rental buildings usually

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require background information to make sure their new tenants don’t pose
any financial risk. But in this case Oakwood had rented to a guy who had
provided hardly any information at all. No references. No bank accounts.
No previous addresses.
And most significantly, no mention of Eric’s name. The apartment had
been rented in the same name the telephone service was under, Joseph
Wernle. The only other piece of information on the entire application was a
work phone number, 213 507-7782. And even that was curious: it was not
an office number but, as I easily determined, a cell phone with service
provided by PacTel Cellular.
Yet at least it gave me a lead to follow.
A call to PacTel Cellular gave me the name of the store that had sold the
cell phone listed on Eric’s rental application: One City Cellular, in the
Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, the area that includes the campus
of UCLA. I made a pretext call to the store and said I wanted some
information about “my” account.
“What’s your name, sir?” the lady on the other end asked.
I told her, “It should be under ‘U.S. Government’ ”—hoping she would
correct my error… hoping it 
was
an error. And at the same time hoping she
would be helpful enough to give the name on the account.
She did. “Are you Mike Martinez?” she asked.