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

PART TWO

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Eric

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ELEVEN

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Foul Play
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arly in January 1992, my father called from Los Angeles to say he was
worried about my half-brother, Adam, his only other child. I had always
been envious of Adam’s relationship with our father, since I had seen my
dad only intermittently in the first years of my growing up.
Adam had been living with our dad in Calabasas, near Los Angeles,
while he took a prelaw program at Pierce College. He hadn’t come home
the night before, which my father said wasn’t like him. I tried to offer
reassurance, but what could I say when I really didn’t know anything about
the situation?
Dad’s concern turned out to be appropriate. For several miserable days,
he was beside himself at hearing no word from Adam. I tried to console and
reassure him while I made anxious calls to Uncle Mitchell and Adam’s
friend Kent and paged Adam himself over and over and over.
A few days later my dad called, sobbing and distraught. He had just
gotten a phone call from the police. They had found Adam, in the passenger
seat of his car, parked at a major druggie hangout, Echo Park. He was dead
of a drug overdose.
Though Adam and I had grown up separately, in different cities except
for a short period when we both lived with our father in Atlanta, in the last
couple of years we had grown very close, half-brothers who had become
closer than many blood brothers. When I had first started getting to know
him in Los Angeles, I couldn’t stand any of the music he cared about—rap
and hip-hop, anything by 2 Live Crew, Dr. Dre, or N.W.A. But the more of
it I heard when we were together, the more it grew on me, and music
became part of the bond that drew us to each other.
And now he was gone.

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My father and I had had an up-and-down relationship, but I felt he
needed me now. I got in touch with my Probation Officer and gained
permission to return to LA for a time to help my dad cope with Adam’s
death and work his way out of the depression he seemed to be in, even
though I knew that this would heighten my own sadness. A day later I was
in my car, heading west on I-15 out of the desert for the five-hour pull to
Los Angeles.
The drive gave me time to think. Adam’s death just didn’t seem to make
sense. Like a lot of kids, he had gone through a rebellious period. At one
point he had dressed to emulate his favorite “Goth” bands and was really
embarrassing to even be seen with in public. He wasn’t getting along with
our dad at all then, and had moved in with my mom and me for a while. But
more recently, in college, he seemed to have found himself. Even if he used
drugs recreationally, it just didn’t make sense to me that he would have
overdosed. I had seen him recently, and there hadn’t been anything in his
behavior that even hinted at his being an addict. And my dad had told me
that the cops hadn’t found any needle marks when they discovered Adam’s
body.
Driving into the night to join my father, I began to think about whether I
might be able to use my hacking skills to find out who Adam had been with
that night and where he had been.
Late in the evening after the dull drive from Las Vegas, I pulled up at my
dad’s apartment on Las Virgenes Road in the town of Calabasas, about
forty-five minutes up the coast from Santa Monica and a dozen miles inland
from the ocean. I found him absolutely devastated about Adam, harboring a
suspicion of foul play. The normal routine of Dad’s life—running his
general contracting business, watching the TV news, reading the newspaper
over breakfast, taking trips to the Channel Islands to go boating, going to
occasional synagogue services—was torn apart. I knew my moving in with
him would pose challenges—he was never an easy man to deal with—but I
wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. He needed me.
When he opened the door to greet me, I was shocked by how distraught
he looked, how gray his face was. He was an emotional wreck. Balding
now, clean-shaven and of medium build, he seemed suddenly shrunken.

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The cops had already told him, “This isn’t the kind of case we
investigate.”
But they had found that Adam’s shoes were tied as if by a person facing
him, not the way he would have tied them by himself. And closer
examination had revealed one needle puncture in his right arm, which
would make sense only if someone else had given him the fatal dose: he
was right-handed, so it would have been entirely unnatural for him to inject
himself using his left hand. It was clear he had been with someone else
when he died—someone who had given him the fatal hit, either bad dope or
way too much, then dumped his body in his car, driven it to a seedy, drug-
infested part of Los Angeles, and split.
If the cops weren’t going to do anything, I would have to be the
vigilante investigator.
I took over Adam’s old room and dived into researching the phone
company records. My best guesses were the two people I had been calling
when I first heard from Dad: Adam’s closest friend, Kent, whom he was
supposed to be with on his last weekend; and, unhappily, my uncle
Mitchell, who had already destroyed his own life with dope. Adam had
become very close to Uncle Mitchell. My dad had a hunch that Mitchell had
played a role in Adam’s death, maybe even been responsible for it.
At the funeral, the viewing took place in a separate room. I went in alone
and found Adam laid out in an open coffin. Being at the funeral of someone
close to me was a new and emotionally difficult experience. I remember
how different he looked—unrecognizable. I just kept hoping that I was
trapped in some sort of cruel nightmare. I was alone in a room with my only
brother, and I would never again be able to speak with him. It’s a cliché, I
know, but my sadness made me realize how little time we really have in this
life.
One of my first tasks in LA was to contact the Probation Officer to whom
my case had been transferred, Frank Gulla. Late fortyish, with a medium
build and a friendly, calm personality, he was even relaxed about the rules
—for example, not insisting on our “required” monthly visits after he got to
know me. When I would finally get around to showing up at his office, he’d
have me fill out the monthly reports that I had missed, and we’d backdate

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them. I don’t suppose he was that lax with guys charged with more serious
crimes, but I appreciated his being so casual with me.
I threw myself into the investigation. Dad and I both suspected Adam’s
friend Kent knew more than he was telling us. Was he perhaps relieving his
conscience by opening up to other people? If so, was he careless enough to
do it over the telephone? With my friend Alex, I drove to Long Beach,
where Kent lived. After a little snooping at a nearby apartment complex, I
found what I needed: a phone line not currently wired to the phone of any
customer. One call to the local CO was all it took to get a tech to “punch
down” a connection from Kent’s line to the unused phone line, turning it, in
effect, into a secret extension of his phone. Alex and I set up a voice-
activated tape recorder inside the phone company’s terminal box to capture
every word spoken on both ends of Kent’s calls.
For the next several days, I made the hour-and-a-half trek from my dad’s
place to the apartment building with the hidden recorder in Long Beach.
Each time I’d retrieve the previous day’s tape, replace it with a fresh one,
and pop the microcassette into my portable tape player to listen to Kent’s
conversations as I drove back to Dad’s. In vain. Hours and hours of effort,
and nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile I was also piecing together a picture of people Uncle
Mitchell had been talking to in the hours before Adam’s death. I was able to
social-engineer employees at PacTel Cellular and get his call detail records,
hoping these would show me whether Mitchell had been making calls one
after another, suggesting a sense of urgency or panic, or calls to other
friends he might have been asking for help.
Nothing.
I tried PacTel Cellular again, hoping to find out which cell phone sites
Mitchell’s calls had been relayed through, which might show whether he
had been near Echo Park, where Adam’s body had been abandoned. But I
couldn’t find anyone who knew how to access the records I wanted. Either
PacTel wasn’t storing that data, or I just wasn’t managing to find the people
who knew which system had access to the database it was in and how to
retrieve it.
All in a good but ultimately worthless cause, I had slipped back into my
full-blown hacker way of life.
My road had come to a dead end. I had tried every tactic I knew and
gotten nowhere: I didn’t have much more insight into Adam’s death than I’d

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had when my father first called me about it. I was angry and frustrated,
miserable at not being able to give my father and myself the satisfaction of
having discovered at least some morsels of useful information.
Closure to this sad episode would come only many years later.
My dad stopped talking to Mitchell, convinced he was responsible for
Adam’s death. The two brothers would not speak to each other again until
the very end of my father’s life, when he was suffering the ravages of lung
cancer.
As I write this, Uncle Mitchell has just died. At the family gathering,
one of his ex-wives took me aside. In embarrassment, she said, “I’ve been
wanting to tell you this for a long time. Mitchell wasn’t a nice man. The
night that Adam died, Mitchell called me. He was so upset I could hardly
understand him. He said he and Adam had been shooting up together and
Adam had gotten too big a dose and keeled over. Mitchell panicked. He
shook Adam, he put him in the shower, but nothing helped.
“He called me to ask for help. I refused to be involved. So he called a
drug dealer he knew, who helped get Adam’s shoes on and carry the body
into Adam’s car. They drove in two cars to Echo Park, left Adam dead in
his car, and drove away.”
So my father had been right all along. Instead of calling 911, Mitchell
had sacrificed a nephew he loved to save his own neck.
I can feel myself getting angry again as I write this.
I had believed all along that Mitchell was somehow involved, yet now,
hearing the truth, I felt sick to my stomach that he had been capable of such
a thing, and that he had died without ever admitting it. This man whom I
had loved and respected and looked up to had not been able, even on his
deathbed, to tell me the truth.

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