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Mystery Hacker
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ou look amazing.”
She answered, “You look amazing, too.”
What a boost to my ego! No one had ever said anything like that to me
before, not even Bonnie. And certainly not an extremely hot chick like this
one, with a body, face, and hair that made me picture her on stage in a
casino somewhere, strutting in high heels and a skimpy costume. Or half a
costume.
She was pumping on a StairMaster 6000, hard enough to work up a
sweat. I climbed onto the one adjacent and struck up a conversation. She
was friendly enough to give me hope. It didn’t last. She said she was a
dancer with Siegfried and Roy—that pair of famous magicians who were
doing large-scale illusions and working with live tigers in their act.
Wouldn’t I love to know how they did some of their tricks! Any
magician would. I started asking questions. She gave me this cold “fuck
you” look and said, “I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. I can’t tell
you anything.” She was nice about it, but firm. The “Go away” message
was all too clear.
Damn.
My cell phone rang, providing a handy escape from the embarrassment.
“Hey, Kevin,” the voice said.
“Hi, Adam.” My half-brother—the person in the world I was closest to
who wasn’t a hacker. In fact, he didn’t even use a computer.
After we had chatted for a bit, he said, “An ex-girlfriend of mine knows
this big superhacker named Eric Heinz. She says he knows some phone
company stuff you might not know about, and he told her he really needs to
talk to you.”
And then he said, “Be careful, Kevin. I don’t think this girl is
trustworthy.”
My first reaction to Adam’s call was to blow off the whole thing—just
not follow up. I’d had enough problems even hacking with guys I had
known for years and felt I could trust.
But resisting temptation had never been one of my virtues. I called the
number Adam had given me.
The phone was answered not by Eric but by a guy who said his name was
Henry Spiegel, which he pronounced “Shpeegel.” Spiegel was one of the
most colorful characters I’ve ever run across, and my list includes, besides
Ivan Boesky, people like famed palimony attorney Marvin Mitchelson,
convicted of tax evasion, and ZZZZ Best scammer Barry Minkow. Spiegel
was a case all his own, a guy who had a reputation for being on the
periphery of everything from bank robbery to porno to ownership of a hot
new Hollywood nightclub, one of those written-about places where young
actors and wannabes line up outside every night.
When I asked Spiegel to put Eric on the phone, he said, “I’ll get him for
you. I’ll have to page him and then conference you in. He’s really
cautious.”
“Cautious”?
I
was cautious; this guy sounded way beyond that, more
like superparanoid.
I waited. What was I doing, anyway? If this guy was really into hacking,
even talking to him on the phone was a bad idea for me. The terms of my
release said I couldn’t have any contact with hackers, and associating with
De Payne was risky enough. One word from this Eric Heinz guy could be
enough to send me back to a prison cell for up to another two years. Except
for the Novatel cell phone hack, I had been mostly playing by the rules for
the two years I had been back on the street. I had only another year of
supervised release left. So why had I made this call?
Here I was, getting in touch with Eric while telling myself I was doing it
out of courtesy to my half-brother.
How could I have known that this one innocent call would be the
beginning of an insane adventure that would change my life forever?
When Eric came on the phone that first time, he busied himself by dropping
enough hints to make sure I understood he knew a lot about phone
phreaking and computer hacking.
He said something like, “I’ve been working with Kevin. You know—the
other one, Kevin Poulsen.” He was trying to build cred with me on the
shoulders of a hacker who had just been busted for rigging radio contests
and supposedly stealing national security secrets.
He told me, “I’ve been on break-ins to telco offices with him.” If it was
true that he had been inside telephone company offices, that was really
interesting. It meant Eric had inside information from actually using and
controlling the equipment in central offices and other telco facilities. So he
definitely had my attention. Eric’s claim of knowing a bunch of Poulsen’s
tactics was good bait.
To set the hook, he sprinkled his gab with details about phone company
switches like the 1AESS, 5E, and DMS-100, and talked about systems like
COSMOS, Mizar, LMOS, and the BANCS network, which he said he and
Poulsen had accessed remotely. I could tell he wasn’t just bluffing his way
through: he knew more than a little about how the systems worked. And he
made it sound like he had been part of the small team that had worked with
Poulsen to rig those radio contests, which newspaper articles said Poulsen
had won a couple of Porsches from.
We talked for about ten minutes. Over the next week or so, I called
Spiegel a few more times for conversations with Eric.
A couple of things nagged at my gut. Eric didn’t talk like other hackers;
he sounded more like Joe Friday, like a cop. He asked questions like, “What
projects have you been up to lately? Who are you talking with these days?”
Asking a hacker that kind of stuff was a little like going into a bar where
bank robbers hung out and saying to one of them, “Ernie sent me. Who’d
you pull your last job with?”
I told him, “I’m not hacking anymore.”
“Neither am I,” he said.
This was pretty much the standard cover-your-ass line with somebody
you didn’t know. Of course he was lying, and he meant for me to know it.
He must have figured I was lying, too. In my case, the statement was pretty
much true. But, thanks to this guy, it wouldn’t be for long.
I told him, “There’s a friend of mine I think you’d like to talk to. His
name is Bob. What number should I have him call you at?”
“Tell him to call Henry the same way you just did,” he said. “He’ll
conference me in again.”
“Bob” was my on-the-spur-of-the-moment alias for Lewis De Payne.
It would have been hard to find another hacker with Eric’s inside
information. Yes, I was drawing Lewis even deeper into my hacking, but
with him acting as my front guy, I could find out what information Eric had
that Lewis and I didn’t, while still protecting myself.
Why was I willing to be tempted into exchanging information with Eric,
when for me to even talk with him violated my terms of release? Think of it
like this: I was living in Las Vegas, a city I didn’t know well and didn’t
much like. I kept driving past the gaudy hotels and casinos, all tarted up to
draw the tourists and gamblers. For me this was no fun-town. There was no
sunshine in my life, none of the thrill and intellectual challenge I’d
experienced when hacking into the phone companies. None of that
adrenaline flow from finding software flaws that would let me
electronically march right into a company’s network—the rush I’d felt back
in the days when I was known in the online underworld as “Condor,” my
hacker handle. (I had originally chosen that name out of admiration for a
character who was a particular hero of mine, the one-step-ahead-of-
everybody guy played by Robert Redford in the movie
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