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

What the fuck?
I knew DMV employees could be lazy and
incompetent, but this took the cake. 
What idiots!
I thought.
I wanted to call the DMV and talk to the stupid technician, but I had left
my cell phone in the car. I started pacing back and forth through Kinko’s,
trying to decide whether it would be too risky to ask a clerk to use one of
the store’s phones, or if I should use the pay phone outside.
I was to learn much later how very curious a scene this must have been
for anyone there who noticed: as I paced back and forth staring at the fax
and trying to decide what to do, the DMV investigators were following in
my footsteps, keeping close behind me. Every time I turned in the opposite
direction, they would swing right back into position behind me, as if we
were all part of some clown act at the circus.
At last I stepped outside the back entrance, and walked over to the pay
phone. As I picked up the receiver and started dialing, I noticed four suits
walking out in my direction.
Huh
, I thought. I hadn’t paid for the fax yet, and now there was going to
be trouble over the couple of bucks I owed. All four were looking directly
at me.
I said, “What do you want?” staring down the woman, who was closest
to me.
“DMV investigators—we want to talk to you!”
Dropping the pay phone handset, I called out, “You know what? 
I
don’t
want to talk to 
you!
” while tossing the fax into the air, calculating that one
or more of them would go for it.
I was already running through the parking lot. My heart was racing, my
adrenaline pumping. I focused all my energy on outrunning my pursuers.
Those many hours I’d spent in the gym, day after day, month after
month, paid off. The hundred pounds I had shed made all the difference. I
ran north through the parking lot, dashed over a narrow wooden footbridge
leading into a residential area dotted with palm trees, and kept running as
hard as I could, never looking back. I was expecting to hear a helicopter at
any minute. I needed to change my appearance, and quick, so if an air unit

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was dispatched to search for me, I could slow to a walk and blend in with
the normal street traffic.
When I was far enough ahead to be out of my pursuers’ sight, without
slowing I began to shed clothes. Still a gym rat, I was wearing shorts and a
gym shirt under my street clothing. I got off my outer shirt and threw it over
a hedge as I ran. I ducked down an alley, stepped out of my trousers and
dumped them in the bushes in someone’s yard, then started running again.
I kept up the pace for forty-five minutes, until I was sure the DMV
agents had given up. Sick to my stomach and feeling as if I might vomit
from the exertion, I ducked into a neighborhood bar to rest and catch my
breath.
I was happy about my narrow escape but distressed all the same. I found
a pay phone in the back of the bar and dialed my own cell phone, still in
Gram’s car. I called over and over and over. No answer.
And again. And still no answer. Shit! Why wasn’t she picking up? I was
afraid she might’ve gone into Kinko’s looking for me, maybe even asked
the clerks or other customers if they’d seen me. Damn! I had to get hold of
her.
Time for a Plan B. I called the supermarket and told the person who
answered that my elderly grandmother was parked in the handicapped spot
right outside the market. “I was supposed to meet her,” I explained, “but
I’m stuck in traffic. Could someone please go out and bring her to the
phone? I’m worried about her health.”
I paced back and forth, waiting and waiting. Finally the man I’d spoken
to got back on the phone and said he hadn’t been able to find her. Oh, 
fuck!
Had she ventured inside Kinko’s? I was going out of my mind wondering
what could be happening.
At last I managed to track down my cousin Trudy and tell her what was
going on. After yelling at me, she drove to the parking lot and searched up
and down the rows until she found Gram’s car—not in front of the
supermarket but outside Kinko’s. My sixty-six-year-old gray-haired
grandmother was still sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for me.
The two of them joined me at a nearby Dupar’s restaurant, which I had
made my way to on foot, feeling sick over Gram’s having had to sit in her
car for what by now was about three hours. When they walked in the door, I
was hugely relieved to see that she was okay.
“I kept calling you—why didn’t you answer the phone?” I asked.

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“I heard it ringing, but I don’t know how to use a cell phone,” she
answered.
Incredible! It had never crossed my mind that a cell phone might be a
mystery to her.
After about an hour of waiting, she said, she had gone into the Kinko’s.
It was obvious that something was going on, something that looked to her
like police activity. One lady was holding a plastic bag with a videotape in
it. When I asked what she looked like, Gram described the lady DMV agent
who had chased me.
In the normal course of my hacking, I never felt guilty about getting
information I wasn’t supposed to have or talking company employees into
giving me highly sensitive, proprietary information. But when I thought
about my grandmother, who had done so much for me and cared so much
for me all my life, sitting there in her car for so long, waiting and anxious, I
was filled with remorse.
And the videotape she mentioned? You may never have noticed this, but
every Kinko’s has security cameras that record a constant video stream onto
a videotape loop that can hold something like twenty-four hours’ worth of
data. That video no doubt contained more than a few clear images of me.
Those by themselves wouldn’t help the DMV agents attach a name to
the person they were now looking for, but something else would. The fax
sheets I had thrown into the air were turned over to a crime lab, which
succeeded in lifting prints from the papers. Soon enough they had a name:
Kevin Mitnick.
When agents at the FBI put together a “six-pack”—a set of six photos,
one of me and five of other random guys—DMV Inspector Shirley Lessiak,
my pursuer, had no trouble picking me out as the person she had chased.
I had outrun Lessiak and her colleagues, but in another sense I would
continue running. I was now “on the run”—starting my new life as a
fugitive.

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