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

TWENTY-THREE

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Raided
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n a Monday in late September 1992, I arrived at work early, before
anyone else was in. As I walked down the hall, I started hearing a faint
beep, beep, beep
. I thought I must have incorrectly entered the alarm code
for getting into the Teltec offices. But the farther I went down the hall, the
louder the beeping became.
Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep…
The sound was coming from my office.
Maybe somebody had stashed an electronic alarm of some sort at my
desk?
No. It was something else.
My early-warning system.
The beeping had been triggered by the software package monitoring my
scanner.
The scanner was picking up an FBI cell phone in the area.
Shit shit shit shit shit
.
The computer showed me the phone number of the cell phone that had
triggered the alarm: 213 500-6418.
Ken McGuire’s cell phone
.
The DDI software on my computer showed that the alarm had been
triggered at 6:36 a.m., a couple of hours earlier.
McGuire had been in the area, somewhere near Teltec.
My computer was also showing the digits McGuire had dialed: 818 880-
9XXX. Back in those days, in Los Angeles, the “9” in that position of the
phone number usually meant a pay phone. McGuire was calling a pay
phone in my neighborhood.

---

Moments later it hit me, and it confirmed my worst fear: McGuire had
called the pay phone near the Village Market, the convenience store directly
across the street from my apartment.
That was only a couple of miles away from Teltec, barely more than a
five-minute drive.
A thousand things were running through my mind. Why were they here?
They were setting up to follow me. Or they followed me here to arrest me.
Should I run? Hide? Sit and wait for them to come bursting through the
door?
I was startled. Scared. Terrified.
Wait a minute. If they had come to arrest me, they would have knocked on
my door while I was still in the apartment.
Why would McGuire call the Village Market? Suddenly the answer
came clear: to get a search warrant, they would need a description of my
apartment complex and the exact location of my unit. Maybe McGuire
wasn’t ready to arrest me yet—he was just getting the location details that
he needed to put into the search warrant before presenting it to a judge.
Michael and Mark both arrived at work. I updated them: “Ken
McGuire’s been to my apartment this morning, while I was still asleep.”
Their expressions were priceless: “How the hell does he always find out
these things?!” All along, they had been fascinated by my stories about how
I was penetrating the entire FBI operation against me. They had been eating
it up, and this was the capper.
I gathered up all my personal belongings and headed down the stairs to
my car, freaked out and uncomfortable, afraid at any moment I’d hear
someone shout: 
“Mitnick, FREEZE!”
In the parking area, I peered intently
into every car to see if there were any guys in suits keeping watch for me.
As I cautiously pulled out of the garage, my eyes were all but glued to
the rearview mirror. I was concentrating more on what might be behind me
than what was in front.
I jumped onto the 101 Freeway and gunned it to Aguora Hills, one city
over, far enough away that I would be comfortable using my cell phone.
Rolling off the freeway, I pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot.
My first call was, naturally, to Lewis. “The Feds are coming,” I told
him.

---

Most everything washed off Lewis. The shell of arrogance was usually
impenetrable.
Not this time. I could hear the news had made him uncomfortable,
nervous. If the Feds were targeting me, they had to know he’d been
involved in my hacking. It was almost a dead certainty that they wouldn’t
want just Mitnick.
I went back to my apartment and went through it thoroughly, inch by
inch, rounding up everything I had accumulated since the last cleanup that
might help make a case against me. Papers, disks, scraps of anything with
writing on it. And the same with my car.
That evening I knocked on Mark Kasden’s door and asked if I could
store the stuff in his closet along with the earlier stash I had left with him.
I returned to my apartment and moved my computer back once more to
my father’s friend’s place, where I had hidden it once before.
When I was finished, I was satisfied I was thoroughly clean.
I booked into a small motel just down the street, afraid to stay in my own
apartment. I didn’t sleep very well and was awake early, tossing and
turning.
Tuesday morning I drove to work feeling like a character in a bad spy
movie: Any helicopters? Crown Victorias? Suspicious-looking guys in suits
and short haircuts?
Nothing.
I felt the other shoe could drop at any moment.
But the day went by peacefully. I actually managed to get some work
done.
Driving home, I stopped by a doughnut shop and bought a dozen assorted.
On the door of the fridge, I Scotch-taped a note: “FBI doughnuts.”
On the box, in large letters, I wrote: