Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [158]
En route, I called Ron Austin and told him I had been raided. Turned out my talking to Ron wasn’t such a great idea: like Petersen, he had become a snitch in the hope of getting a reduced sentence. He’d been recording our conversations and turning the tapes over to the FBI, playing both sides all along: being a friend to me by giving me the California DMV access… while at the same time cooperating with the Feds. He was out on bail, gathering information on Lewis and me for FBI Special Agent McGuire and company. I’ll admit he did a clever job of gaining my trust by giving me access to the DMV database.
Now he called his Bureau handler to let him know that the guy the Secret Service had just raided for cell phone cloning was really Kevin Mitnick. I hadn’t told him what city I was in, but I’m sure it didn’t take the Secret Service very long to figure it out.
(In a conversation we had while I was writing this book, Austin also revealed an interesting tidbit: the Feds cloned his pager and waited for my calls to get the pay phone number and the time I would be calling so they could attempt to trace my next call. They didn’t realize that I had full access to the telco switches that controlled the numbers I was calling—and that I always checked for any traps and watched for any switch messages indicating that a trace was being done in real time. I had to be cautious, especially with a skilled hacker like Austin. My countermeasures were obviously effective: the Feds had never showed up at my door.)
Arriving in LA, I picked a hotel conveniently near Union Station. Getting up in the middle of the night, I turned on the light to find dozens of cockroaches skittering around the floor. Ewwww! I had to put on my shoes just to walk the few steps to the bathroom, first cautiously shaking out each shoe to be sure it wasn’t occupied by any of the critters. The chills down my spine were overwhelming: I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I was gone fifteen minutes later, moving to a place called the Metro Plaza Hotel, which I chose because it had a special meaning for me. When I was held in solitary confinement at LA’s Federal Metropolitan Detention Center, my room had looked out over this hotel. How often I had wished I could be there instead of in my ten-by-eight-foot room with its stonelike mattress!
I hadn’t seen my dad in a long time. He listened to the story of my near arrest and the cops not even knowing they had almost nabbed a guy the Bureau had been hunting for two years. I got an absence of response from him, as if he didn’t know how to help me. It was as if I were describing a scene from a movie or something pulled from my creative imagination.
I called Bonnie, said I was in LA, and wanted to get together. Why call her? There weren’t many people I could talk to about my predicament. My hacking buddies, one after another, had turned disloyal. There wasn’t anybody else in Los Angeles I could trust.
She had her own reason for being willing to see me. De Payne knew that my computer, tapes, and disks had been seized in Seattle, and he wanted to know how much of our correspondence the cops might have found—and how much of it would incriminate him. Bonnie was probably serving the interests of her lover, hoping to get some assurances from me that the Seattle Police and the Secret Service weren’t going to turn up any information in my electronic files that could land him in trouble.
We met, and I told her I had lost everything and needed to start over. Though the files on my computer were encrypted, I had backed up most of them onto cartridge tapes, unencrypted, that I’d been about to stash in my bank safety deposit box. But I’d never made it to the bank with the tapes, which meant that either the Feds or the local Seattle cops had all that information, unencrypted.
She could see I was freaking out. She tried to calm me down and offer advice, but we both knew that my only options were to turn myself in and