Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [105]
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