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

Dateline, Good Morning America
, and God only
knows how many other major shows. My capture was all over the news for
three days straight.
Typical of the tone of the coverage was a piece published in the
February 27, 1995, issue of 
Time
. The subhead began:
AMERICA’S MOST WANTED HACKER HAS BEEN
ARRESTED
The news from my court-appointed attorney in Raleigh wasn’t good. I
was indicted on twenty-three counts of access device fraud. Of these,
twenty-one were related to calls made when my phone was cloned to
someone else’s number. The other two counts were for possessing
information, specifically the mobile phone number and electronic serial
number pairs that could be used for cloning. The maximum sentence was
twenty years for each free phone call. 
Twenty years for each call!
I was
facing a worst-case scenario of 460 years.
It did look bad for me—460 years was no walk in the park. I didn’t
relish the idea of being locked away in prison for the rest of my life, unable
to live a happy and productive life, and especially not being able to spend
quality time with my mom and grandmother. They had me, hands down, for
cloning cell phone numbers (the ESN’s were considered unauthorized
access devices under Federal law). It was also true that I’d violated the
terms of my 1989 supervised release by hacking into the voicemail of
Pacific Bell Security Investigator Darrell Santos to gain information on the

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Teltec case, and also by associating with “computer hackers.” But 460 years
for these “evil” crimes? Were there no war criminals left?
Of course, the Feds had also found Netcom’s customer database that
contained more than 20,000 credit card numbers on my computer, but I had
never attempted to use any of them; no prosecutor would ever be able to
make a case against me on that score. I have to admit, I had liked the idea
that I 
could
use a different credit card every day for the rest of my life
without ever running out. But I’d never had any intention of running up
charges on them, and never did. That would be wrong. My trophy was a
copy of Netcom’s customer database. Why is that so hard to understand?
Hackers and gamers get it instinctively. Anyone who loves to play chess
knows that it’s enough to defeat your opponent. You don’t have to loot his
kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile.
It always seemed strange to me that my captors had such trouble
grasping the deep satisfaction that could be derived from a game of skill.
Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe my motives seemed
incomprehensible to them because they themselves would have found the
temptation of all those credit cards impossible to resist.
Even Markoff, in his 
New York Times
article, admitted that I was clearly
not interested in the prospect of financial gain. The scale of what I’d passed
up was brought home to readers by Kent Walker’s assertion that I
“allegedly had access to corporate trade secrets worth billions of dollars.”
But since I was never going to use or sell that information, what it was
worth didn’t matter to me. So what was the nature of my crime? That I’d
“allegedly had access”?
Now that I’d finally been caught, prosecutors in several Federal
jurisdictions were frantically compiling long wish lists of counts and
accusations against me, but I still had reason for hope. Despite the evidence,
the government’s case was not airtight. There were legal conflicts that had
to be resolved first. Shimmy, for instance, had been secretly working as a de
facto government agent, and was intercepting my communications without
a warrant, which smacked of gross government misconduct. My attorney
had also filed a motion claiming that the government’s search warrant was
flawed. If the court ruled in my favor, all the evidence seized in North
Carolina would be inadmissible, not only in Raleigh but everywhere else.

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To John Bowler, the young, up-and-coming Assistant U.S. Attorney
assigned to my case, this must have seemed like a golden opportunity. If he
could get convictions on all counts and convince the judge to slap me with a
massive punitive sentence, the media attention alone would be enough to
launch his career. But the reality was that Federal sentencing guidelines
would ordinarily require the judge to base my sentence on the minimal
losses to the cell phone companies when I made those free phone calls.
After my first court appearance, when I was transported to the Johnston
County Jail in Smithfield, North Carolina, the U.S. Marshals ordered my
jailers to put me in the one place I feared most: “the hole.”
I couldn’t believe it was happening. Shuffling toward that door in leg
irons and shackles, I resisted every step. Time itself seemed to slow down. I
knew then that the main thing that had kept me on the run for the past three
years was my fear of this place. I didn’t think I could take being in there
again. Now here the guards were, leading me right back into my nightmare,
and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
The last time, in 1988, they’d put me in solitary confinement for more
than eight months to get me to do what they wanted: as soon as I signed
their plea agreement, they put me in with the general population. And this
time, the government wasn’t shoving me into this hellhole to protect the
public from me, or me from other inmates. It was coercion, pure and
simple. The message was clear: all I had to do was agree to the prosecutor’s
demands and waive certain rights, and agree to only call my immediate
family and legal counsel, and they’d be more than happy to let me out of
solitary, into the general population.
I wish I could describe the sinking feeling I had as I stepped inside.
After living in dread of “the hole” for so many years, it took everything I
had not to totally lose it when they locked the door behind me. I would
rather have shared a cell with a tattooed, whacked-out drug dealer than find
myself locked up alone like this again.
The rap about computer geeks is that we spend countless hours in small,
dark rooms, crouched over the glowing screens of our laptops, not even
knowing whether it’s day or night. To a nine-to-fiver, that might seem like
solitary, but it’s not.
There’s a huge difference between spending time alone and being
thrown into a disgusting, dirty coffin that is your home today, tomorrow,
next month, with no light at the end of the tunnel, controlled by people who

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are doing their best to make you miserable. No matter how hard you try to
reframe it in your head, being in the hole is grim and depressing twenty-
four/seven. Solitary confinement is widely condemned as torture. Even
now, the United Nations is working to have its use declared inhumane.
Many experts say that extended solitary confinement is far worse than
water boarding or other forms of physical torture. In the hole, prisoners
commonly suffer from lethargy, despair, rage, and severe depression, and
other forms of mental illness. The isolation, idleness, and lack of structure
can easily start to unravel your mind. Without anyone else to interact with,
you have no way to rein in your thoughts or keep your perspective. It’s far
more of a nightmare than you can even imagine.
That’s why every study of solitary confinement of more than sixty days
has shown damaging psychological effects. Sometimes they’re permanent. I
was afraid of that. It had been over six years since I had been in solitary,
and it still haunted me. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.
A week after I was thrown into solitary, the Federal prosecutors offered
a deal to move me into the general population if I would waive my rights
and agree to:
no bail hearing
no preliminary hearing
no phone calls, except to my legal counsel and a few family
members.
Sign the agreement, they said, and I could get out of solitary. I signed.
My Los Angeles attorney John Yzurdiaga and his partner Richard
Steingard helped me make the deal. Since I had been arrested in Raleigh,
both attorneys graciously donated their time to work on my case. John had
volunteered to represent me pro bono ever since the time in late 1992 when
FBI agents searched my Calabasas apartment.
Once I was back in the general population of the prison, I spoke to John
Yzurdiaga and Richard Steingard over the phone. There was a tension in

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John’s voice I’d never heard before. To my surprise, both men started
grilling me about state secrets. “Exactly what kind of confidential
information did you have access to? Have you hacked into any U.S.
intelligence agencies?”
When I understood what they were getting at, I laughed out loud.
“Right. Like I’m a spy, engaged in some sort of secret espionage!” I said.
Neither one of them laughed.
“Don’t lie to us, Kevin,” John said, sounding alarmingly earnest. “This
is the time to come clean.”
I blinked in disbelief. “Come on, guys—you’re kidding, right?”
Then Richard dropped the bomb: “Assistant U.S. Attorney Schindler is
demanding that you agree to a CIA debriefing.”
What the hell was going on? Sure, I’d hacked the world’s most popular
cellular phone manufacturers, Bell operating companies, and operating-
system development houses throughout the United States, but I’d never
even attempted to go after 
any
government targets. How could the Feds
have made that leap? The accusation was completely unfounded.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll participate in the
debriefing so long as it’s understood that I won’t inform on anyone else.” I
didn’t have any knowledge of anyone who had hacked into government or
military systems, but even so, it was against my ethical and moral principles
to become a snitch for the government.
In the end, nothing ever came of it. Maybe Schindler or the Justice
Department was just on a fishing expedition. It made me think back to the
time when Marty Stolz at Intermetrics secretly told me that the super-hacker
the Feds were chasing had compromised the CIA. I chalked it up to one
more instance of the myth getting out of hand.
In medieval times, the myths that built up around magicians used to
cause them serious trouble. Sometimes these myths and superstitions even
got them killed. A traveling performer would amaze the local villagers with
tricks and sleights of hand. Because they had no idea how he was doing
those tricks, they couldn’t guess at the extent of his abilities. He seemed to
have the power to make things appear and disappear at will. That was the
point. But if anything went wrong—some cows died, the crops failed, little
Sarah got sick—it was all too easy to blame the magician.
If things had been different, I might secretly have enjoyed being called
“the World’s Most Wanted Hacker” and laughed it off when people believed

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I was a super-genius who could hack into anything. But I had a bad feeling
that it was going to cost me—and I was right. The “Myth of Kevin Mitnick”
was about to make my life a whole lot harder.
Because I was such a high-profile inmate, I soon needed John Yzurdiaga to
intervene again. The head jailer was opening all my mail, including the
letters from my attorneys, which violated my attorney-client privilege. I
told him to stop. He kept right on doing it. I warned him that my lawyer
would get the court to order him to stop. He ignored me.
John got the court order. The jailer had to comply, but he was furious
about it. So he called the U.S. Marshals Service and told them to move me
to another jail, which they did. The Vance County Jail made Johnston look
like a Holiday Inn.
When I was being moved, a deputy U.S. Marshal with a Southern accent
so thick it sounded like he was doing a bad parody of a Good Ol’ Boy
sheriff laughed and said, “You’re the only prisoner we ever had that got
booted out of jail!”
After I’d been in jail for about five months, my court-appointed public
defender in Raleigh, John Dusenbury, recommended that I agree to what is
known as a “Rule 20.” This meant that I would plead guilty to a single
count of possessing the mobile phone number and electronic serial number
pairs that I used for cloning my cell phone in exchange for a recommended
sentence of eight months, though I might still be facing up to twenty years
if the judge decided not to go along with the prosecutor’s recommendation.
Judge Terrence Boyle approved the deal, though. Even better: my case was
now transferred to Los Angeles for sentencing and to resolve the pending
violation of supervised release, which meant I would be transferred, as well.
My move to Los Angeles from Raleigh was surprisingly awful. Federal
prisons are notorious for a form of punishment known as “diesel therapy.”
It’s so bad that prisoners often consider it among the cruelest aspects of
being incarcerated. What ought to be a simple drive is deliberately and
maliciously extended for days or even weeks. Along the way, prisoners are
subjected to as much pure misery as their sadistic guards can heap on.
After being woken up at 3:30 a.m., any prisoners who are due to be
transported are put in a large room and strip-searched. A chain around each

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prisoner’s waist connects tightly to his handcuffs at stomach level, so he
can barely move his arms. His feet are shackled too, so he can barely walk
or move. Then he and his fellow inmates are loaded onto a bus and driven
for eight hours each day, with random stops in towns along the route where
everyone disembarks, spends the night in another cell, and is woken up
again the next morning to go through the whole process again. Eventually,
you arrive at your destination feeling completely exhausted.
During my diesel therapy back to Los Angeles, I was detained in Atlanta
for several weeks. The Federal penitentiary there was by far the scariest of
any of the prisons I was held in the whole time I was in custody. The high
walls of the prison are lined with coiled-razor-wire fences. There is no
doubt that you’re walking into a dungeon. At every entry, there are big
electronic doors and gates. The deeper you go into the bowels of the prison,
the more you realize there is no way out.
When I was finally moved again, I was flown to several prisons in
different states across the country. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I
was not in a tolerant mood. When I got off the plane, the deputy U.S.
Marshal gave me a big grin and said smugly, “Hey, Mitnick! So the U.S.
Marshals finally caught you! It’s all about good police work.”
“The U.S. Marshals had nothing to do with it,” I told him. “It was a
smarter civilian, working for the FBI.”
The deputy’s face fell, as all the other inmates around me laughed.
Back in Los Angeles, I was charged with violating the conditions of my
supervised release by hacking into a Pacific Bell security agent’s voicemail,
along with lesser infractions like associating with Lewis De Payne.
After ten months, my two-man pro bono legal team came to me with the
plea agreement offered by Federal prosecutor Schindler. I could hardly
believe what I was hearing: eight years in prison… and that wasn’t even the
worst of it. This was what was called a “nonbinding plea agreement,”
meaning that the judge wouldn’t be bound by the prosecutor’s
recommendation, but would instead be free to set a much stiffer sentence.
Even worse, I would be agreeing to pay