Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [117]
At the end of the day, I stuck the embossed certificates into my notebook and walked out the door.
By the close of the workweek, I had the information I needed for numerous identities. Later, I would only need to write the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the state where the child was born and request a certified copy of the deceased’s birth certificate. With it, I would become the new me. I also had fifty blank birth certificates, each neatly embossed with the South Dakota state seal. (Several years later, when the Feds were returning property that had been seized from me, they accidentally gave back the embossed South Dakota birth certificates as well. Alex Kasperavicius, who was picking the stuff up for me, thoughtfully pointed out that they probably didn’t really want to do that.)
The State Registrar employees were sorry to see me go: I had made such a good impression that a couple of the ladies even hugged me as I said good-bye.
That weekend I drove back to Sioux Falls and treated myself to my very first skiing lesson. It was glorious. I can still hear the instructor shouting at me, “Snowplow! Snowplow!” I enjoyed the sport so much that I soon took it up as one of my regular weekend activities. There aren’t many big cities in the United States like Denver, with ski slopes within such easy driving distance.
Not many parents get Social Security cards for their infants. But it’s suspicious for a guy in his twenties to walk into a Social Security office, ask to be issued a card, and say that he has never had one before. So I had my fingers crossed that some of the names I had dug out of the South Dakota files were for deceased tykes whose parents had obtained Social Security numbers for them. As soon as I was back in my new apartment in Denver, I called my buddy Ann at the Social Security Administration and had her check a few of the names with their associated dates of birth to see if a Social had already been issued. The third name, Brian Merrill, was a hit: baby Brian had had a Social Security number. Fantastic. I had found my permanent identity!
There was one more thing I needed to do. I had uncovered a lot of information about the FBI’s operation, yet the key to unlocking the central puzzle had eluded me: who was the guy I knew as “Eric Heinz”? What was his real name?
I’m not even vaguely in his category, but just as Sherlock Holmes’s work was about solving puzzles as much as it was about catching criminals and miscreants, my hacking, too, was always concerned in some way with unraveling mysteries and meeting challenges.
Finally I thought of an avenue I had never explored. Eric had encyclopedic knowledge about the Poulsen case. He claimed to have accompanied Kevin Poulsen on several PacBell break-ins and boasted that the two of them had found SAS together.
Hours and hours online, scouring databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis for newspaper and magazine articles that made any mention of Eric, had yielded nothing. If he had really done the things with Poulsen that he said he had, maybe I could work backward by searching for the names of Poulsen’s other known cohorts.
Eureka! In no time at all, I found an article on LexisNexis that named two Poulsen codefendants, Robert Gilligan and Mark Lottor. Maybe one of these guys was the phony Eric Heinz. I got on the phone immediately, hiding my excitement as I called the law enforcement telephone number at the California DMV and ran both codefendants’ driver’s licenses.
Dead end. One guy was too short to be Eric, the other too heavy.
I kept at it. And then one day, on Westlaw, I found an article that had just been published. A small newspaper, the Daily News of Los Angeles, had carried a story about Poulsen’s case coming up for trial. The piece gave the names of two others charged as Poulsen coconspirators, Ronald Mark Austin and Justin Tanner Petersen.
I was familiar with Austin and knew what he looked like; he definitely wasn’t