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What the hell?!
“Yes, I’m Mike. By the way, what’s my account number again?”
That was taking a chance, but she was a retail clerk at a cell phone store,
not a knowledgeable customer service rep at the cell phone company. She
wasn’t the least bit suspicious and just read off the account number for me.
Heinz… Wernle… Martinez. What the fuck was going on?
I called the cell phone store back. The same young lady answered. I
hung up, waited a bit, and tried again. This time I got a guy. I gave him
“my” name, phone number, and account number. “I lost my last three
invoices,” I said, and asked him to fax them to me right away. “I
accidentally erased my address book off my cell phone and I need my bills
to reconstruct it,” I said.
Within minutes, he was faxing the invoices. Driving a little too fast but
not, I hoped, fast enough to get myself pulled over, I sped to Kinko’s. I
wanted to know as soon as possible what was in those bills.
The fax turned out to be far more expensive than I expected. When I
looked at Martinez’s bills, my jaw dropped. Each of the three monthly bills
was nearly twenty pages long, listing well over a hundred calls. Many of
them were to area code 202—Washington, DC—and there also were
lots
of
calls to 310 477-6565, the Los Angeles headquarters of the FBI.
Oh, shit! One more confirmation Eric must be an FBI agent. The
situation was getting more and more worrisome every time I turned over a
new rock. Every lead I followed took me toward the people I most wanted
to stay away from.
Hold on now. That wasn’t the only possibility. My new “friend” Eric Heinz
might indeed be an agent himself, but on second thought, that was hard to
believe—I’d found out by then that he wasn’t just hanging out at rock-and-
roll clubs. The crowd he kept company with included our initial
intermediary, Henry Spiegel, who had told me he once employed Susan
Headley, aka Susan Thunder, that hacking hooker who had pointed a finger
at me for breaking into the COSMOS center and once physically cut all the
phone lines going to my mom’s condominium complex as an act of
vengeance. And there were Eric’s own stories of having sex with a different
stripper every night.
No, he sure didn’t sound like a kind of guy who would pass the FBI’s
vetting process for would-be agents. So I figured that he probably wasn’t an
agent at all. Maybe he was just a guy the Feds had something on, whom
they had put to work as a confidential informant—a snitch. But why?
Only one explanation made sense: the FBI was trying to round up some
hackers.
The Feds had targeted me before, and made sure the arrest got big media
coverage. And now, if my suspicions were correct, the Bureau was dangling
a carrot in front of me. By introducing Eric into my life, the agents were
doing the equivalent of sticking a bottle of Scotch under the nose of a
“reformed” alcoholic to see if they could bump him off the wagon.
Four years earlier, in 1988,
USA Today
had even superimposed my face
over a huge picture of Darth Vader on the front page of its Money section,
tarring me as “the Darth Vader of the hacking world” and digging up the old
label of “the Darkside Hacker.”
So maybe it shouldn’t seem surprising that the FBI might have decided
to make me into a priority.
And it wouldn’t be hard. After all, when I was still just a young man,
prosecutors had felt justified in manipulating a judge with that absurd story
about my being able to launch a nuclear missile by calling NORAD and
whistling into the phone. I felt damned certain they wouldn’t hesitate to do
it again now if they had the chance.
The address on Mike Martinez’s cell phone bill turned out to be some
attorney’s office in Beverly Hills.
I called the office claiming to be from One City Cellular, Martinez’s cell
provider. “Your bill is past due,” I told the girl who answered. “Oh, we
don’t pay those bills,” she said. “We just forward them to a post office box
in Los Angeles,” and she gave me the box number and the address—the
Federal Building at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard. Not good.
My next call was to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, in Pasadena. “I
need to send a complaint,” I said. “Who is the inspector for the Westwood
area of Los Angeles?”
Using the inspector’s name, I called the post office in the Federal
Building, asked for the postmaster, and said, “I need you to look up the
application for this P.O. box and give me the name and address of the
applicant.”
“That post office box is registered to the FBI here at 11000 Wilshire.”
The news didn’t come as a surprise.
So who was the person who was passing himself off as Mike Martinez?
What was his relationship with the FBI?
Even though I was desperate to know how much the government had on
me, probing further just didn’t make any sense. It would mean getting
deeper and deeper into the situation, making it all the more likely that I
would eventually be rounded up and sent back to prison. I couldn’t face
that. But could I really resist the urge?
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