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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.

PART THREE

On the Run

TWENTY-FIVE

Harry Houdini

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So I was now on the run, a fugitive. Given what Deputy Marshal Salt had told my mother—that he had a warrant for my arrest—it seemed like the only choice I had.

Yet David Schindler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to my case, would confide to me years later that he was surprised to learn I had taken off. What could he have been thinking? Eric had told the FBI that I was associating with Lewis, thus violating the terms of my supervised release, and I was sure he must also have reported that I had obtained full access to SAS and had probably been using it to wiretap people. PacBell Security had found out I was intercepting the voicemail of at least one of its agents: that was another new charge that could be filed against me. And Lewis had been blabbing and bragging to Eric about other hacking the two of us had been doing.

Gram did the driving on the five-hour haul to Vegas; I hadn’t driven at all since finding out that the Feds had a warrant out for my arrest. It wasn’t exactly a joyful trip. How could it be?

Reaching town after dark, she dropped me off at the Budget Harbor Suites, where a friend of ours had kindly booked me a room in his own name.

My first task would be to build a new identity for myself and then disappear—even though it meant leaving behind friends and family and the life I had been enjoying. My goal was to erase the past and make a fresh start toward a different kind of future.

So how did I know how to go about creating a new identity? If you remember my favorite reading material at the Survival Bookstore, where I spent so many days hanging out as a kid, you already know the answer. That book The Paper Trip I had soaked up years before had explained the exact steps for obtaining a new identity. I used the same principles but approached the task differently: I needed a workable, temporary new persona immediately; once I had relocated, I could take my time in creating a second, permanent identity that I would live under for the rest of my life.

On a pretext call to the Oregon DMV, claiming to be a Postal Inspector, I asked the clerk to run a search for anyone named Eric Weiss who had been born between 1958 and 1968—a ten-year period bracketing my real birth year,