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

TWENTY-FOUR

---

Vanishing Act
Xvof jg qis bmns lg hvq thlss ktffb J cifsok EAJ uojbthwsbhlsg?
B
y November I was still jobless but was making a little money doing stuff
for Teltec’s former employee Danny Yelin, who had some outside
assignments he was feeding to me. Things like finding people for car
repossessions: I would track them through the public utilities and the
Welfare Department.
Meanwhile I was sitting on a time bomb: the Feds would be poring over
all the stuff of mine they had picked up from Mark’s apartment, plus
whatever they had grabbed from Lewis’s, and might find grounds for
sending me back to jail.
What should I do?
Well, for the moment, I thought it would be comforting to be with my
mom and Gram for Thanksgiving, so I called my Probation Officer, Frank
Gulla, and asked for permission, half expecting to be turned down.
Surprisingly, he granted the permission, so long as I returned by December
4.
I would later learn that back on November 6, the Probation Department had
written to the court asking for a bench warrant for my arrest, citing my
accessing of a Pacific Bell security agent’s voicemail and my associating
with Lewis De Payne. The bench warrant was issued the next day, setting
bail at $25,000.
So why did Gulla give me permission to leave town, instead of telling
me I needed to come in and see him? I haven’t figured that out to this day.

---

When you’re on Federal parole, probation, or supervised release, you need
to check in with the local Probation Department whenever you travel to a
different Federal district. The morning after I arrived in Las Vegas, I headed
downtown to the Bonneville Avenue office to check in.
Natural instinct told me I should make sure there wasn’t anything going
on that I would want to know about before I got there. I just had a gut
feeling that something might be up.
In the car, I had a ham radio that I’d modified so I could transmit and
receive outside the frequency bands authorized for amateur radio operators.
I tuned to one of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s tactical
frequencies.
I listened for half an hour or so to pick up the protocol a cop would use
when he wanted to ask if there was an outstanding warrant on the guy
driving a car he had stopped. He’d say, “I need a 10-28 on license plate
____.”
At the same time, I was taking mental note of the identifiers the cops
used when calling Dispatch—for example, “1 George 21.” The Dispatch
operator would respond, “Go ahead, 1 George 21.”
What did they say when they were taking time for lunch or whatever? A
call would come over the air that included phrases like, “Code 7, Denny’s,
Rancho Drive.”
I waited ten minutes, then pressed the Transmit key on my radio, used
the same call sign as some cops who were at that moment enjoying lunch at
Denny’s, and said, “I need a 10-28 on California license plate…,” and gave
my own plate number.
After a moment, the control operator said, “Are you clear 440?”
My heart began racing. What did “440” mean? I had no idea.
I radioed back, “Stand by.”
Using my cloned cell phone, I called the police in the nearby town of
Henderson and said, “This is Special Agent Jim Casey, DEA. I’m in Las
Vegas with the Multi-Agency Narcotics Task Force. I need to know what
‘440’ means in Las Vegas.”
“That’s a wanted person.”
Oh, 
shit!
So “Are you clear 440?” meant “Are you standing away from
the wanted person, so I can tell you what he’s wanted for?” The Las Vegas
police were holding a warrant for me that cited my car’s license tags.

---

If I walked into the Probation Office, it was extremely likely I’d be put
in handcuffs and sent back to prison! I felt great relief that I’d dodged that
bullet, but I was washed with fear.
I was just coming up on the entry to the Sahara Hotel. I swung into their
parking lot, parked, and walked away from the car.
The Sahara. It couldn’t have been any more convenient. My mom
happened to be working as a waitress in the coffee shop. I sauntered
through the glitz and glitter of the casino, past the eager, quietly rowdy
players throwing dice at the craps tables and the hordes of silver-haired,
dead-eyed women feeding the slot machines.
I sat at a table until my mom’s shift ended and she could drive me to her
house. When I told her and my grandmother that I was very likely on my
way back to prison, the family was thrown into turmoil. Thanksgiving is
supposed to be a happy, festive occasion, but there was no happiness for us
that year, no giving of thanks.
Over the next few days, instead of going into the Probation Office, I
made two after-hours phone calls there, leaving messages on the answering
machine that I was reporting in by phone because my mom was sick and I
couldn’t leave her.
Was my Probation Officer calling them about taking me into custody? I
had recognized the synthesized voice on the outgoing message on the
Probation Office answering machine, which clued me in about what type of
answering machine they had. That manufacturer used “000” as the default
code for retrieving messages. I tried and, yes, once again nobody had
bothered to change the default code. I called every couple of hours,
listening to all the messages. Happily, there were none from my Probation
Officer.
My grandmother, my mother, and her boyfriend, Steve Knittle, drove me
back to Los Angeles. I certainly wasn’t going to be driving my own car. We
arrived late on December 4, the day my travel permit expired. I walked into
my apartment with no way of knowing that U.S. Marshal Brian Salt had
come by to arrest me early that morning. I stayed for the next three days,
scared and anxious, expecting the FBI to show up at any minute, leaving
very early every morning, and going to a movie every night to distract
myself. Maybe another guy would have been out drinking and partying all

---

night, but my nerves were shot. I figured these might be my last days of
freedom for a while.
But I wasn’t going to leave LA again until my supervised release ended.
I had decided if they came for me, so be it—they could take me. But if they
didn’t come by the time my supervised release expired, I had decided on my
future: I would become someone else and disappear. I would go to live in
some other city, far away from California. Kevin Mitnick would be no
more.
I tried to think through my plans for going on the run. Where would I
live while I set up a phony identity? What city should I pick as my new
home? How would I earn a living?
The idea of being far away from my mother and grandmother was
devastating to me because I loved them so much. I hated the idea of putting
them through any more pain.
At the stroke of midnight on December 7, 1992, my supervised release
officially expired.
No call from my Probation Officer, no early-morning raid. What a relief.
I was a free man.
Or so I thought.
My mother, grandmother, and Steve had been staying at my cousin
Trudy’s. We now switched places, my mother and Steve moving into my
place to pack up all my things while I moved in with my grandmother at
Trudy’s. No point hanging around the apartment now that my supervised
release was up.
People who wear or carry badges sometimes work in mysterious ways.
Early on the morning of December 10, three days after my supervised
release ended, my mother and Steve were at my apartment in the last stage
of packing up my things and making arrangements for moving the furniture.
A knock at the door. The minions of law enforcement had finally shown up,
a trio of them this time: U.S. Marshal Brian Salt, an FBI agent whose name
my mom didn’t catch, and my nemesis, Agent Ken McGuire, whom I had
still never seen or met in person. My mother brazenly told them that she and
I had had an argument a few days earlier. I had left, she said, and she hadn’t
heard from me since and didn’t know where I was. She added, “Kevin’s
probation is up.”

---

When Salt said he had a warrant for my arrest and had left a notice on
my door for me to contact him, she told him the truth: “He never saw any
notice. He would’ve told me if he had.”
She then had a shouting match with the agents over whether or not my
probation was up.
Later she told me she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by them. In her
opinion, they were acting like idiots—especially the one who opened the
refrigerator and peered inside, as if he thought I might be hiding in there.
She had just looked at the agent and laughed at him. (Of course, he might
have been checking to see if I had left any doughnuts again.)
They finally went away, empty-handed and with no information.
As far as I was concerned, I was a free man—free to leave Los Angeles
before any new charges were filed against me.
But I knew I couldn’t ride back to Las Vegas with my mother. That would
be too dangerous; they might be watching her. So Gram offered to drive me
back to Vegas after I finished up some business in LA.
One unfinished piece of business was still haunting me. I had conned the
DMV into sending me a copy of Eric Heinz’s driver’s license, but I’d used
my safety precaution of having the first Kinko’s forward it to a second one
—just in case law enforcement had caught on and was staking out the place,
waiting for me. Since what I picked up had been faxed twice, the image was
so grainy that it hadn’t been much help. I still wanted to get the driver’s
license photographs of Wernle, Ways, and Heinz to see if any of them were
the same person.
On December 24, Christmas Eve, just before starting to load my things
into Gram’s car, I called the DMV posing as Larry Currie, the name of a
real investigator with the Los Angeles County Welfare Fraud Unit. Giving
that unit’s Requester Code, along with Currie’s PIN, birth date, and driver’s
license number, I requested Soundexes on Eric Heinz, Joseph Wernle, and
Joseph Ways.
The technician who took my request had been alerted. She notified
DMV Senior Special Investigator Ed Loveless, who, according to an
official report filed afterward, did a little checking and found that the fax
number I’d provided belonged to a Kinko’s in Studio City.

---

Loveless told the technician to make up a phony Soundex, and she
prepared one with a picture of “Annie Driver,” a fictional character the
agency used for instructional purposes. Then Loveless contacted an
investigator at the DMV office in Van Nuys and asked her to stake out the
Kinko’s location to identify and arrest the person who came in to pick up
the fax. The investigator recruited some colleagues to accompany her, and
the FBI was notified and agreed to send an agent of its own. All of this was
going on when the only thing everybody really wanted was to be at home,
getting ready for Christmas Eve.
A few hours after calling to request those Soundexes from the DMV, with
my things now packed into my grandmother’s car, we ate lunch with Trudy.
I said my good-byes and told her how much I had appreciated being able to
stay with her. She and I hadn’t been in close contact, so the favor she’d
done me seemed all the more special.
As Gram and I set out, I told her I had a small errand to do that would
take me only a minute. We headed for Kinko’s.
By now the four DMV inspectors, dressed as usual in their civilian clothes,
were getting impatient. They had been waiting for more than two hours
already. The FBI agent detailed to join them had shown up, hung around for
a while, and then taken off again.
I directed my grandmother to the Kinko’s, in a strip mall at Laurel Canyon
and Ventura, in Studio City (so-called because of the nearby Disney,
Warner’s, and Universal lots). I pointed out where I wanted her to park, in a
handicapped space outside a supermarket, a couple of hundred feet or so
from the Kinko’s. She hung her handicapped placard on the rearview mirror
as I got out of the car.
You might expect that Kinko’s would be empty on Christmas Eve.
Instead it was as full of people as it would’ve been in the middle of a
workday. I waited in line at the fax counter for something like twenty
minutes, growing increasingly impatient. My poor grandmother was
waiting for me, and I wanted nothing more than to pick up the Soundexes
and get out of town.

---

Finally I just walked behind the counter myself, flipped through the
envelopes of incoming faxes, and pulled out the one labeled with my alias,
“Larry Curry [which the DMV had misspelled—it was actually “Currie”],
Los Angeles County Welfare Fraud.” When I pulled the sheets out of the
manila envelope, I was pissed off: not what I’d asked for, just a picture of a
nondescript lady.