Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [114]
Dressed in a suit and tie and looking, I thought, perfectly suitable for a job in an upscale law firm, I was shown into a conference room to meet with the IT manager, a very friendly lady named Lori Sherry.
I’m good at interviews, but this one was a little more exciting than most as I struggled not to be distracted: Lori was really attractive. But—bummer—she was wearing a wedding band.
She started off with what must be a standard opening: “Tell me a little about yourself.”
I tried for charming and charismatic, the style that the remake of Ocean’s Eleven would capture a few years later. “I broke up with my girlfriend and wanted to get away. The company I was working for offered me more money to stay, but I knew it would be better to start fresh in a different city.”
“Why Denver?”
“Oh, I’ve always loved the Rocky Mountains.”
So, a plausible reason for leaving my last job. Check that one off the list.
For half an hour we went through all the standard things about my short- and long-term goals and other typical interview topics. She took me on a tour of the computer room, and then I was given a four- or five-page written test on my system administrator skills, mostly on the Unix and VMS operating systems. I gave a couple of wrong answers, again so I wouldn’t look overqualified.
I thought the interview had gone well. For job references, I had set up a phony company in Las Vegas, Green Valley Systems, and then rented a mailbox and signed up with an answering service that used live operators, who had instructions to tell callers, “No one is available to take your call right now,” and then ask them to leave a message. After the interview, I started calling the service every hour. The next day, there was a message for me: Lori wanted to speak with Green Valley’s IT director. Excellent!
I had already scouted a hotel with a large lobby that offered acoustics like an office area, and checked that there was a pay phone out of the stream of traffic. (I couldn’t chance calling her on my cloned cell phone because the call would show up on the real cell customer’s bill.) Lowering my voice an octave or so and adopting a bit of a pompous tone, I provided Eric Weiss with a very favorable recommendation.
I got a job offer a few days later at a salary of $28,000—nothing to brag about, but enough to meet my needs.
I was supposed to start work two weeks later. Great: that would give me time to find an apartment, fill it with a load of rental furniture, and then dive into an important project that had been on my mind. My Eric Weiss identity was safe and verifiable. Still, there was already a real Eric Weiss walking around in Portland with the same Social Security number, birth date, and alma mater. That was okay for the time being, since the other Eric lived far enough away that our paths weren’t likely to cross. But I wanted an identity I could safely use for the rest of my life.
Nineteen states, including California and South Dakota, at the time had “open” death records—meaning the documents were a matter of public record, available to anyone. Those states hadn’t yet caught on to how easy they were making things for someone like me. There were other states that would have been more convenient for me to get to, but South Dakota seemed so remote that I figured there was much less chance some other guy in my situation might search its records and come up with one or more of the identities I had found.
Before setting out, a bit of preparation. My first stop was King Soopers supermarket, where there was a machine on which you could enter your own text and instantly print out twenty business cards for five bucks. My new cards read:
ERIC WEISS
Private Investigator
Below those lines were a fake Nevada PI license number, a phony Vegas address, and an office