Actually, it
would
have been difficult for me to win it straight up. But
dumb luck came to my rescue. As I was working on Lenny’s terminal,
hacking into Digital’s network, I spotted a wallet on the floor under his
desk. I “accidentally” dropped my pen, then bent over to get it and stuffed
the wallet into my sock. I told Lenny I had to take a leak.
Inside the wallet, I found a slip of paper with the code for the digital
door lock written on it. I couldn’t believe it:
Lenny was such a clever
hacker, but he couldn’t remember a simple number? And he’d been foolish
enough to write down the code and leave it in his wallet? It seemed so
preposterous that I wondered if he was setting me up. Had he planted the
wallet just to jerk my chain?
I went back to his desk, replaced the wallet, and told him he’d have to
give me an hour to guess the door code. We agreed that the only rule was
that I couldn’t break the lock. Anything else was fair game.
A few minutes later, he went downstairs to get something. When he
came back, he couldn’t find me. He searched everywhere,
then finally
unlocked the door to the computer room. I was sitting inside, typing on the
VMS console, logged in with full privileges. I smiled at him.
Lenny was furious.
“You cheated!”
he shouted.
I stuck out my hand. “You owe me a hundred and fifty bucks.” When he
resisted, I said, “I’ll give you a week.” It felt great to knock the ego of the
self-important Lenny down a few notches.
He didn’t pay and didn’t pay. I kept giving him extensions, then told him
I was going to charge him interest. Nothing. Finally, more as a joke than
anything else, I called accounts payable at his company and pretended to be
from the IRS’s Wage Garnishment Division. “Do you still have a Leonard
DiCicco working there?” I asked.
“Yes, we do,” said the lady on the other end.
“We have a garnishment order,” I said. “We need you to withhold his
pay.” The lady said she’d have to have authorization in writing. I told her,
“You’ll
have a fax on Monday, but I’m giving you official notice to
withhold all paychecks until you receive further documentation from us.”
I thought Lenny might be a little inconvenienced, but no worse than that.
When no fax arrived on Monday, payroll would just give him his money.
When the people from accounting told Lenny about the IRS call, he
knew instantly who’d been behind it.
But he was so over-the-top, out-of-control furious that he lost all sense
of reason and did a really stupid thing: he went to his boss and told him that
the two of us had been hacking into DEC from VPA’s offices.
His boss didn’t
call the cops; instead, he and Lenny together called
security staff at DEC and told them who’d been plaguing them over the past
several months. Eventually the FBI was called in, and its agents set up a
sting.
Personnel from the FBI and Digital Equipment Corporation set up camp
at VPA prior to one of our late-night hacking sessions. They placed
monitoring software on VPA’s computers that would record everything we
did. Lenny was wearing a wire to capture our conversations. That night my
target was Leeds University in England. After earlier identifying Neill Clift
as one of Digital’s main sources of information about VMS security bugs, I
wanted to get into the VMS system in Leeds’s
Organic Chemistry
Department, where Clift had an account.
At one point I sensed that something a bit weird was going on with
Lenny and asked him, “Is everything all right? You’re acting strange.” He
said he was just tired, and I shrugged off his odd behavior. He was probably
petrified I’d figure out what was really happening. After several hours of
hacking, we called it quits. I wanted to keep going, but Lenny said he had to
get up early.
Several days later, I got a call from Lenny, who said, “Hey, Kevin, I finally
got my vacation pay. I have your money. C’mon over.”
Two hours later I rolled into the small ground-floor
parking garage of
the building where VPA had its offices. Lenny was standing there, not
moving. He said, “I need to get the VT100 terminal emulator software to
make a copy for a friend,” referring to software on disks he knew I had in
the car. It was already 5:00 p.m. and I told him I hadn’t eaten all day and
was starving, and even offered to buy him dinner. He kept insisting. I
wanted to get the hell out of there: something felt wrong. But finally I gave
in and, leaving the motor running, stepped out of the car to get the disks.
“You know that feeling in your stomach when you’re about to get
arrested?” Lenny taunted. “Well, get ready!”
The whole garage was suddenly filled with the sounds of car engines.
Cars shot out at us from what
seemed like every direction, stopping in a
circle around us. Guys in suits jumped out and started screaming at me,
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