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So I hadn’t been arrested, and I knew the agents wouldn’t find anything incriminating in my apartment. My guess was that they were looking for something more serious than cavorting with Lewis to charge me with.

At the time I still didn’t know that Teltec had been raided months earlier, so I had no reason to think the Feds might be shaking down Kasden’s apartment at the same time they were searching mine. But that was exactly what they were doing, apparently having figured that my hacking might be tied in somehow with Teltec’s illegal activities—accessing TRW with stolen merchant credentials, and so on. So much for my bright idea that I could safely stash my disks and notes at Mark’s.

But time might be on my side. My supervised release from my conviction for hacking into DEC with Lenny DiCicco was due to expire in less than three months. If the Feds hadn’t shown up with an arrest warrant by then, I would be scot-free.

The computer I was using at Teltec didn’t have any encryption tools on it, and I had to make sure the agents didn’t get anything more on me.

I pulled up at Teltec and dashed up the stairs. Fantastic—no team of Federal agents at work. Unbelievable!

I sat down at the computer in my office and gave the commands for erasing all data. In case you don’t already know this (it’s been in the news from time to time, perhaps most notably when White House staffer Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s cover-up attempt over the Iran-Contra affair got tripped up), simply giving “Delete” commands doesn’t truly erase data from a computer’s hard drive. Instead, it just changes the name of each file to simply mark it as having been deleted; those items no longer show up in searches, but they’re still stored on the drive, and they can be recovered.

So instead of just giving Delete commands, I used a program called “WipeInfo,” part of the Norton Utilities suite. WipeInfo is designed not just to mark files as deleted but to write over them several times so they can no longer be recovered. When the program was done, there was no way a single file of mine could have been recovered from that drive.

I called my Teltec boss Michael Grant and told him about the raid. He wanted to know, “Where are you now?”

“I’m at the office.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m wiping my computer clean.”

He was furious and tried to order me to stop. Incredible. I had thought we were a team; I had thought he and his father would be on my side. Instead he was trying to talk me into leaving the evidence on my computer. It sounded like the Teltec bosses might be hoping to slime their way out of the trouble they were in by helping the Feds build a case against me.

In fact, one of my fellow employees at Teltec—another investigator who had become a buddy of mine—later confirmed that this was exactly what Michael Grant tried to do shortly after that: make a deal with the Feds to go easy on him and his dad in exchange for their testifying against me.

I was sad and disappointed when my suspicions were confirmed. I had thought Michael Grant was my friend. I never gave evidence against anyone, even though I could have made deals that would have greatly benefited me.

I guess when your friends are people who are breaking the law, you’re naive if you expect loyalty.

A couple of days later, Michael Grant told me I was through at Teltec. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

TWENTY-FOUR

Vanishing Act

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By 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?