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

both times?
Not long after
listening to the crew from Pacific Bell Security worrying over how to
booby-trap me, I got another earful.
I hadn’t tried wiretapping Eric because he knew we had access to SAS,
and I was worried that the frame techs might have been instructed to call
Pacific Bell Security or the FBI if anyone tried to attach equipment to his
line. Eric thought he had a safeguard against my listening to his phone calls.
He had played with SAS enough to know that you hear a very distinct 
click
when somebody used it to drop in on your line. But he didn’t know about
making a connection with a SAS shoe, which, as I’ve explained, was a
direct connection, using a cable that the frame technician placed directly on
the customer’s cable-and-pair, and so produced no audible 
click
on the line.
By chance I went up on Eric’s line one day using a SAS shoe, and heard
him in conversation with someone he was calling “Ken.”
I didn’t have to wonder who Ken was: FBI Special Agent Ken McGuire.
They were talking about what evidence Ken needed for getting a search
warrant on Mitnick.
The call threw me into an intense panic. I began to wonder if they were
following me or even preparing to arrest me. Eric didn’t sound like an
undercover informant; instead, his calling McGuire “Ken” sounded like one
agent talking to another, with McGuire, the older, more experienced agent,
leading the more junior agent to a better understanding of what they needed
to get a search warrant.
Search warrant! Evidence against Mitnick!
Holy shit
, I thought. 
Again
I would have to get rid of every scrap of
evidence that could be used against me.
As soon as they hung up, I immediately reprogrammed my phone,
cloning it to a different phone number, one I had never used before.
Then I called Lewis at work. 
“Emergency!”
I told him. “You’ve got to
go to the pay phone outside your office building 
right now
”—just in case
the Feds were monitoring cell phone transmissions near his workplace.
I got in my car and drove to a place that I knew would be covered by a
different cell phone tower—again, in case agents were monitoring the one
serving the Teltec area.
As soon as Lewis answered the pay phone, I told him, “The government
has been building a case against us, and Eric is part of it! It’s one-hundred-

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percent confirmation that we are the targets. Change your number right
now.”
“Oh, shit.” That was his only response.
“We need to go into cleanup mode,” I said.
He sounded dejected and scared. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I know what to
do.”
All the time I had been laboring over my research on Eric, I’d expected to
find out he was an FBI snitch, if not an agent. But now that it was certain, I
knew this was no game anymore. This was for real. I could almost feel the
cold steel of the prison bars, I could almost taste the bland, barely edible
prison food.
I was waiting at Kasden’s door when he got home from work, with
boxes of disks that I asked him to store for me. That same evening I drove
over to the home of another friend of my dad’s who had agreed to let me
park my computer and all my notes with him.
De Payne’s cleanup wasn’t so easy. Something of a pack rat, he had
swarms of mess all over his apartment. Digging through the piles to find the
items that could help the government build a case against him had to be a
huge challenge. And it wasn’t something anybody could help him with: he
was the only one who knew which hard drives and floppy disks were safe
and which could land him in prison. The task took him a couple of full
days, the whole time under pressure of what would happen if federal agents
showed up before he was finished.
I should have been using every resource I had to find out about Eric before
this, I knew. But better late than never. I called Ann, my contact at the SSA.
She looked up Eric Heinz and gave me his Social Security number,
birthplace, and date of birth. She also told me he was listed as receiving
disability payments for a missing limb.
If his story about his motorcycle crash was true and he really was
walking around on an artificial leg, the doctors must have done some great
job, because I had never seen even the hint of a limp. Or maybe he wasn’t
really missing a leg at all but had just found a doctor to make a phony
report so he could collect benefits; that might explain how come he never
seemed to go off to a job.

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I told Ann, “This is a fraud case. Let’s see if we can find his parents’
names.” Eric’s driver’s license said that he was a junior, which made this
step a whole lot easier. She looked up all of the people listed as Eric Heinz
Sr. with a birth year in the range that I had calculated might be reasonable
for Eric’s father. She found one with a birth date of June 20, 1935.
That evening, Teltec coworker Danny Yelin and I met for dinner at Solley’s
delicatessen in Sherman Oaks. After we ordered, I went to the pay phone
and called the number I had tracked down for Eric Heinz Sr.
What happened next maybe shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. It
caught me off guard.
“I’m trying to get hold of Eric,” I said. “I’m a friend of his from high
school.”
“Who is this?”
the man asked in a suspicious tone. “What’s your name
again?”
“Maybe I have the wrong Eric Heinz. Is there an Eric Junior?”
“My son passed away,” he said.
He sounded annoyed, bordering on controlled anger. He said he wanted
my phone number, that he would call me back—obviously planning to
report me to the authorities and have me investigated. No problem: I gave
him the number for the pay phone in the deli and hung up.
He called back immediately. We began our dance again, with me trying
to pull him closer, him keeping me at arm’s length.
I asked, “When did he die?”
Then it came out: “My son died as an infant.”
I felt the heat of a big adrenaline rush. The explanation was obvious:
“Eric Heinz” was a stolen identity.
Somehow I managed to pull myself together enough to babble
something about being sorry for his loss.
So who was he really, this one-legged bullshit artist who was working
with the FBI and using a phony name?
Meanwhile I felt the need to satisfy myself that what Eric Heinz Sr. had
told me about his son’s dying in infancy was really true. Again with the
help of my pal Ann at the Social Security Administration, I tracked down
Eric Sr.’s brother, who confirmed the story: Eric Jr. had died in a car

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accident in 1962, at the age of two, on his way to the Seattle World’s Fair
with his mother, who was also killed in the crash.
No wonder Eric Sr. had turned so cold when I claimed his son and I had
gone to high school together.
There is a particular kind of satisfaction in following a thread all the way to
its end. In this case, that meant getting a copy of Eric Heinz’s death record
from the King County Bureau of Vital Statistics, in Seattle. I sent a request,
enclosing the nominal fee required, and asked that it be mailed to me at
Teltec.
The father and the uncle had been telling me the truth. The “Eric Heinz”
I
knew was playing a familiar game of infant-identity theft.
Wow! I had finally cracked open the truth about him
.
The name “Eric Heinz” was a complete phony.
So then who the fuck 
was
this guy, who was dead but trying to set me
up?
Going back over my traffic analysis of FBI cell phone calls, I noticed that
McGuire was making a lot of calls to 213 894-0336. I already knew that
213 894 was the area code and exchange for the phones at the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. I called the number and found it was the
phone for one David Schindler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who had been
the prosecutor on the Poulsen case. He’d be just the guy, I thought, who
would get assigned to take on the next big Los Angeles hacker case.
So the government apparently already had a prosecutor assigned to me.
Not good!
From the time I first gained access to PacTel Cellular’s call detail records,
showing an almost-up-to-the-minute log of calls both to and from every one
of the company’s subscribers, I’d been checking them often—targeting the
people on the white collar crime unit who were frequently in touch with
Eric, focusing in particular on Special Agent McGuire.
That was how I happened to spot an attention-getting series of calls:
over a span of a few minutes, McGuire had called Eric’s pager several

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times. And McGuire’s very next call after his last attempt was to a landline
number I hadn’t seen before.
I called the number. Well, hello—I knew that voice well. The person
who answered the phone was Eric. At a new landline number, in a different