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

“I won! No way, I won? Are you kidding me? I
can’t believe it! I never win
any
thing
!” We all stood up and high-fived. The
prize was $1,000, and we’d agreed to share it. Whenever any of us won,
we’d put our winnings in the pot.
After our first four wins, we knew the system was working, but we
faced a new challenge: the radio station rules said that no one person could
win the contest more than once a year. We started offering a deal to family,
friends, and anyone else we knew well enough to think we could trust:
“When the check arrives, you keep $400 for yourself and pass the other
$600 along to us.”
Over the next three or four months, we won that contest about fifty
times. In the end, we stopped only because we ran out of friends! It’s a
shame Facebook didn’t exist yet—we would have had a lot more friends to
work with.
The real beauty of it was that it wasn’t even illegal. I confirmed with an
attorney that as long as we weren’t illegally accessing phone company
equipment or using a friend’s identity without permission, it wasn’t fraud.
Even when I first got the POTS number, I didn’t misrepresent myself as a
phone company employee; I just asked for the number, and the lady gave it
to me.
Technically, we were obeying the rules of the game, as well. The radio
station had a rule that a person could win only once per year. We abided by
that. We were simply exploiting a loophole. We never broke any of the
rules.
Once I surprised myself by taking a long shot. The station provided a
phone number you could call to listen to its shows over the telephone. I
called in from my mom’s living room in Las Vegas, and when the contest
came on, I called in, not really imagining I could reach the station just in
time to be caller number seven. But then I heard the magic words, the
congratulations… followed by the announcer’s asking, “What’s your
name?” I hemmed and hawed until I thought of a friend we hadn’t used yet.
I gave his name and covered the awkward pause by blurting out, “I’m so
excited, I could hardly say my own name!”

---

The four of us each cleared nearly $7,000 from the whole thing. At one
point, when I met Lewis in a restaurant and gave him his share, it was such
a lot of cash that I felt like I was making a payoff in a drug deal or
something.
I used a big chunk of my share to buy my first state-of-the-art laptop, a
Toshiba T4400SX featuring a 486 processor that ran at what was then an
impressive speed, a snappy 25 megahertz. I paid $6,000. And that was the
wholesale price!
It was a sad day when we ran out of people we could trust to cooperate.
One night not long after we got into the radio contest business, I was
driving back to my dad’s apartment when an idea popped into my head, a
scheme that might give me some breathing room while I tried to get to the
bottom of the Eric Heinz / Mike Martinez / Joseph Wernle / Joseph Ways
mystery.
My idea was that Lewis would casually, in passing, let slip a piece of
information about me to Eric. He’d say something like, “Kevin is thinking
about working with some hackers in Europe. He’s sure this is gonna make
him very rich.”
What I figured was this: whatever the Feds already had on me would
seem like small beans next to the prospect of catching me red-handed in the
middle of a big hack, stealing a load of dollars or Swiss francs or deutsche
marks from some financial institution or corporation. They would want to
keep close tabs on me but would be willing to wait patiently until I had
pulled off this big one, anticipating how they’d swoop in, recover the
money, and parade me in handcuffs before the hungry media people and the
hungry-for-scandal public: the FBI saving America from another villain.
And while they were waiting for me to arrange the hack, I hoped, my
supervised release would come to an end. It seemed like a great delaying
action to buy myself some extra time.
Lewis’s attorney, David Roberts, couldn’t see anything wrong with this
plan. Lewis and I met and discussed the details with him on several
occasions. It wouldn’t be a violation of any law for Lewis to tell this lie,
because he wouldn’t be telling it directly to a Federal agent.
My supervised release was due to end in another several months. By the
time the Feds finally lost patience with waiting for my European hack to

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happen, those months would have passed, and it would be too late for them
to simply pick me up and ship me back to prison for violation of the terms
of my release.
Would they really wait that long? I could only hope so. Lewis reported a
couple of days later that he had mentioned my big European hack to Eric,
who had pressed him for details. Lewis told him that I had said it was so
big, I didn’t want to tell him any more about it.
Spring had turned into summer, and I was beginning to feel settled in as
a Los Angelino once again. But my living arrangements needed some
attention. At first, moving in with my dad had felt like a way to begin
making up for all those years when he was living two thousand miles away
and building a life with a new family. I had taken over Adam’s room, partly
out of a sense of wanting to help my dad and be with him in that difficult
time after Adam’s death, and because I was hoping we would become
closer.
But it hadn’t worked out as I had hoped, not by a mile. We had some
good times together but we also had long stretches that felt more like my
early years, when our relationship was a battlefield covered with land
mines.
We all make concessions when we live with others. And though it’s a
cliché, it’s also true that we don’t get to pick our relatives. But somewhere
there’s a line in the sand between what we choose to ignore and put up with,
and what makes the days seem just too annoying. As various women in my
life have made perfectly clear, I’m not so easy to live with myself, so I’m
sure the fault here wasn’t all on one side.
It finally got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore, irked by my
dad’s frequent complaints that I spent too much time on the phone, but even
more irked by his fetish for precision. I like to live in a clean and
straightened-up place, but for him it was an obsession. If you remember
Felix, the character in