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

brrrrr-
brrrr
that meant the number was ringing. After four rings, we heard an
answering machine pick up, then the girlfriend’s outgoing message. “Leave
a message,” I told him with a big grin. As he talked into his cell phone, we
could hear his words coming out over my dad’s speakerphone.
Mark’s jaw dropped. His eyes widened and locked on mine with a look
of awe and admiration. “That’s fucking incredible,” he said. “How did you
do that?!”
I replied with what has since become a tired cliché: “I could tell you, but
then I’d have to kill you.”
On his way out, he said, “I think you’ll be hearing from me.” The idea
of working for a PI firm sounded fantastic. Maybe I could learn some great
new investigative techniques. I watched him walk out the door and hoped I
really would hear from him again.

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?">FOURTEEN

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?">You Tap Me, I Tap You
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A
couple of days after meeting my father’s friend Mark Kasden, from the
PI firm, I set out on the long drive back to Vegas to pick up my clothes and
personal belongings. The Probation Department had approved my request
that I be allowed to move in long-term with my dad.
I left my dad’s at an early hour that didn’t much suit my nocturnal
lifestyle but would let me escape LA before the morning rush hour. During
the drive, I planned to do a little social engineering to investigate the
monitoring boxes I had discovered, the ones I had at first feared were on my
dad’s phone lines.
I turned onto the 101 Freeway eastbound toward the I-10, which would
take me east through the desert. My cell phone was at hand, as usual cloned
to someone else’s phone number.
A funny thing about the freeway. A few weeks earlier, I had been cut off
by a guy driving a BMW. Busy talking on his cell phone, he had suddenly
switched lanes, swerving within inches of my car, scaring the crap out of
me, and only barely missing wiping out both of us.
I’d grabbed my cell phone and made one of my pretexting calls to the
DMV, running the BMW’s license plate and getting the owner’s name and
address. Then I called an internal department at PacTel Cellular (only two
cell phone companies serviced Southern California at the time, so I had a
fifty-fifty chance of getting it right the first time), gave the guy’s name and
address, and found that yes, PacTel Cellular had his account. The lady gave
me his cell phone number, and hardly more than five minutes after the jerk
had cut me off, I called and got him on the phone. I was still shaking with
anger. I shouted, 
“Hey, you fucking dick, I’m the guy you fucking cut off five

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minutes ago and almost killed us both. I’m from the DMV, and if you pull
one more stunt like that, we’re going to cancel your driver’s license!”
He must wonder to this day how some other driver on the freeway was
able to get his cell phone number. I’d like to think that call scared the shit
out of him.
Truth be told, though, that lesson in the dangers of using a cell phone while
driving didn’t have much lasting impact on me, either. Once I had left
behind the traffic noises and honking horns of the rush-hour freeways and
settled in for my drive to Vegas, I was on the phone. My first call was to a
number etched in my memory: the one for the Pacific Bell switching center
that supported all the switches in the west San Fernando Valley area.
“Canoga Park SCC, this is Bruce,” a tech answered.
“Hi, Bruce,” I said. “This is Tom Bodett, with Engineering in
Pasadena.”
The name I’d given was too familiar at the time: Bodett was an author
and actor who’d been doing a series of radio ads for Motel 6, signing off
with, “This is Tom Bodett, and I’ll leave the light on for you.” I had just
tossed off the first name that came into my head. But Bruce didn’t seem to
have noticed, so I kept right on. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fine, Tom, what do you need?”
“I’m working on an unusual case of trouble out of Calabasas. We’re
getting a high-pitched tone—sounds like a thousand cycles. We’re trying to
find where the call was originating from. Could you take a look?”
“Sure. What’s your callback number?”
Though Bruce hadn’t recognized my voice, I sure did know who 
he
was.
He’d been the target of social-engineering scams by me and other phone
phreaks for years, and had been stung enough times that he had grown
suspicious and protective. So anytime he got a call from somebody he
didn’t know who claimed to be a company employee, he’d ask for a
callback number—and it had better be a number he recognized as being
internal to Pacific Bell. He’d ring off and dial you back.
Most phone phreaks either don’t bother to set up a callback number or
don’t know how. They try to get away with some lamebrained excuse like
“I’m just going into a meeting.” But Bruce was hip to all of that, and he
wasn’t going to get conned again. So before my call, I had convinced a

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Pacific Bell employee that I was a company engineer who’d been sent to
LA to tackle a technical problem and needed a temporary local phone
number. Once that was set up, I put it on call forwarding to my cloned cell
phone number of the day. When Bruce called back to the legitimate internal
phone number I had given him, it rang through to my cell phone.
“Engineering, this is Tom,” I answered.
“Tom, this is Bruce calling you back.”
“Hey, thanks, Bruce. Could you take a look at this number—880-0653—
in the Calabasas switch? And let me have the origination information.” In
layman’s terms, I was asking him to trace the call.
“Yeah, one sec,” he said.
I was nervous as hell. If Bruce heard a car horn honking or some other
nonoffice-like background noise, I’d be caught out. This was way too
important—way too interesting—to screw up. I could hear Bruce typing,
and I knew exactly what he was doing: querying the switch to trace the call.
“Tom, okay, the call is coming from the LA70 tandem”—meaning it was
a long-distance call, coming from outside the LA area.
Bruce then gave me the detailed trunking information I needed to
continue the trace. I also asked him for the number of the switching center
that managed the LA70 tandem. My uncanny ability to remember telephone
numbers came in handy once again: I didn’t have to scribble the number
down with one hand while steering with the other. (In fact, most of the
phone numbers and people’s names in this book are the real thing, still
imprinted in my memory from as much as twenty years ago.)
At the end of the call, I told him, “Don’t forget me, Bruce. I’ll likely
need your help again.” I was hoping he’d remember me the next time and
not feel he needed to do that whole callback routine again.
When I called the switching center, the phone was answered, “LA70,
this is Mary.”
I said, “Hey, Mary, this is Carl Randolph from Engineering in San
Ramon. I have a circuit I’m tracing, and it appears to originate from your
office.” Apparently I was on solid ground all around, since Mary didn’t
hesitate, asking me for the trunking information. I gave it to her, and she put
me on hold while she checked. Since phone phreaks rarely targeted toll
switches, she didn’t even bother to verify my identity.
Mary came back on the line. “Carl, I’ve traced the trunk information you
gave me. The call originated from the San Francisco 4E.” She gave me the

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trunking and network information she had found from her trace. I also
asked her for the number for that 4E office, which she was kind enough to
look up for me.
I was now approaching Interstate 15. My route would take me through
the Cajon Pass, running between the San Bernardino Mountains and the San
Gabriel Mountains, making it likely that any call would be dropped. I
would wait until I reached Victorville, on the far side of the pass.
In the meantime, I switched on the car radio and was treated to some
favorite oldies from the fifties. “K-Earth-101,” the disk jockey said. “We’re
giving away a thousand dollars an hour to lucky caller number seven after
you hear the K-Earth jingle—‘the best oldies on the radio.’ ”
Wow! Wouldn’t it be cool to win a grand! But why even bother trying? I
had never won any contest I had ever entered. Still, the idea planted itself in
my mind and would eventually turn from a fantasy into a temptation.
As I approached Victorville, I dialed the number Mary had given me,
reaching a guy who said his name was Omar. “Hey, Omar, this is Tony
Howard with ESAC in Southern California,” I said. “We have a weird
situation here. We were tracing a circuit, and it has a thousand-cycle tone on
it.” I gave him the trunking information from the LA tandem, and he went
off to check.
Leaving Victorville, I was now heading back into an empty stretch of
desert and again concerned that the cell call might drop. I slowed down
from my open-road speed of eighty miles an hour so I wouldn’t leave
Victorville behind quite so quickly.
It was some time before Omar came back on the line. “I heard that high-
pitched tone,” he said, and went