Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [183]
My move to Los Angeles from Raleigh was surprisingly awful. Federal prisons are notorious for a form of punishment known as “diesel therapy.” It’s so bad that prisoners often consider it among the cruelest aspects of being incarcerated. What ought to be a simple drive is deliberately and maliciously extended for days or even weeks. Along the way, prisoners are subjected to as much pure misery as their sadistic guards can heap on.
After being woken up at 3:30 a.m., any prisoners who are due to be transported are put in a large room and strip-searched. A chain around each prisoner’s waist connects tightly to his handcuffs at stomach level, so he can barely move his arms. His feet are shackled too, so he can barely walk or move. Then he and his fellow inmates are loaded onto a bus and driven for eight hours each day, with random stops in towns along the route where everyone disembarks, spends the night in another cell, and is woken up again the next morning to go through the whole process again. Eventually, you arrive at your destination feeling completely exhausted.
During my diesel therapy back to Los Angeles, I was detained in Atlanta for several weeks. The Federal penitentiary there was by far the scariest of any of the prisons I was held in the whole time I was in custody. The high walls of the prison are lined with coiled-razor-wire fences. There is no doubt that you’re walking into a dungeon. At every entry, there are big electronic doors and gates. The deeper you go into the bowels of the prison, the more you realize there is no way out.
When I was finally moved again, I was flown to several prisons in different states across the country. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I was not in a tolerant mood. When I got off the plane, the deputy U.S. Marshal gave me a big grin and said smugly, “Hey, Mitnick! So the U.S. Marshals finally caught you! It’s all about good police work.”
“The U.S. Marshals had nothing to do with it,” I told him. “It was a smarter civilian, working for the FBI.”
The deputy’s face fell, as all the other inmates around me laughed.
Back in Los Angeles, I was charged with violating the conditions of my supervised release by hacking into a Pacific Bell security agent’s voicemail, along with lesser infractions like associating with Lewis De Payne.
After ten months, my two-man pro bono legal team came to me with the plea agreement offered by Federal prosecutor Schindler. I could hardly believe what I was hearing: eight years in prison… and that wasn’t even the worst of it. This was what was called a “nonbinding plea agreement,” meaning that the judge wouldn’t be bound by the prosecutor’s recommendation, but would instead be free to set a much stiffer sentence. Even worse, I would be agreeing to pay millions of dollars in restitution, a sum that might well be more than I would earn in the rest of my life. And I would have to assign any profits from telling my story to my hacking “victims”—Sun, Novell, Motorola, and so on.
John Yzurdiaga and Richard Steingard are two dedicated attorneys, and they had put in many, many hours defending me pro bono. Nevertheless, I had been offered an unbelievably bad deal. Clearly I would either need to be vigorously defended at trial or work out a better deal with the government.
The problem was, I was in no financial position to hire an attorney. Ironically, if I really had been tapping into those 20,000 credit cards before my arrest, I would’ve been able to afford an attorney who had significant resources to defend the case at trial or could have punched holes in the prosecution’s case to get much better settlement terms.
While I was pondering what to do, Bonnie came to visit and to tell me that Lewis De Payne’s attorney, Richard Sherman, was willing