Now multiply that fussiness and apply it to every detail in a three-
bedroom apartment, and you’ll begin to understand the sort of nightmare I
was living.
In the spring of 1992, I gave up and decided to move out. I was happy to
stay in the same complex, close enough to see my dad regularly but not so
close that I was still living under his thumb. I didn’t
want Dad to think I
was turning my back on him.
I was stunned when the lady in the rental office told me there was a
waiting list and it might be a couple of months before a unit became
available for me. Thankfully, I wasn’t stuck at my dad’s: Teltec’s Mark
Kasden agreed to let me move into his guest bedroom until my name came
to the top of the waiting list for a unit of my own.
After
I settled into my new digs, I embarked on another counter-
surveillance project. From Dave Harrison’s office, using my new laptop, I
decided to see what I could pick up by using SAS to listen in on the phone
conversations of Pacific Bell’s manager of Security, John Venn. I popped
onto Venn’s line every now and then. Usually when I stumbled across a call
in progress, it was about nothing of much interest, and I’d only half listen
while doing something else.
But one day that summer I popped in on
his line when he was in the
middle of a conference call with several colleagues. If this were a scene in a
movie, you’d probably groan because the chance of its really happening
would seem so remote. It really
did
happen, though: my ears pricked up
when one of the men mentioned “Mitnick.”
The conversation was
fascinating, revealing… and encouraging. It turned out these guys had no
idea how I was defeating all their systems and traps, and that really irritated
them.
They talked about needing ideas about how they might be able to set a
trap for me, something that would give them hard evidence against me that
they could then turn over to the FBI. They were wondering what I might try
next, so they could have something in place to catch me red-handed.
Somebody suggested a plot for trapping me that was way stupid. I was
dying to bust into their conversation and say, “I don’t think that would
work. This Mitnick guy is pretty clever. You never know—he could be
listening to us right now!”
Yes, I had done other things every bit as gutsy and reckless as that, but
this time I managed to resist the temptation.
On
the other hand, I was less resistant to doing something gutsy when asked
by someone in need. One Thursday at the beginning of June, on a day when
I hadn’t gone in to work because I had some errands I needed to do, I got a
frantic phone call from Mark Kasden: Armand Grant, the head of Teltec,
had just been arrested. His son Michael and
Kasden were trying to raise
bail, but they’d been told it might take as much as a day and a half after
they posted bail before he would be released.
I said, “No problem. Let me know when that’s done, ’cause once he gets
bail, I’ll get him walked out of there in about fifteen minutes.”
Kasden said, “That’s impossible.”
But knowing how law enforcement people respected rank, I just called
another jail in northern Los Angeles—Wayside—and asked, “Who’s the
lieutenant on duty there this afternoon?” They gave me his name. Then I
called the Men’s Central Jail, where Grant was being held. I already knew
the direct-dial internal number for the Warrants Division. When a lady
answered, I asked for the extension at Receiving and Discharge. For
somebody like me,
in a situation like this, there were advantages in my
actually having been through the jail system. I told her I was Lieutenant So-
and-so (using the name I had just been given) at Wayside. “You have an
inmate whose bail is supposed to be posted. He’s working as an informant
on a case for us, and I need to get him out immediately”
and gave her
Grant’s name.
The sound of computer keys came over the telephone. “We just got the
order, but we haven’t entered it yet.”
I said I wanted to talk to her sergeant. When he came on the line, I gave
him the same pitch and said, “Sergeant, can you do me a personal favor?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “What do you need?”
“Once the man’s bond is posted, can you personally walk him through
the whole process and get him out as soon as possible?”
He answered, “No problem, sir.”
I got a call from Michael Grant twenty minutes later to say that his
father was out.
