Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [186]
Please be aware that if Mitnick is taken into custody, he possesses an amazing ability to disrupt one’s personal life through his computer knowledge, i.e., TRW’s, phone service, etc. Exercise extreme caution in leaving anything about which would have personal information about yourself.
Unbelievable! I guess they really were worried I had magical powers.
The Myth of Kevin Mitnick was about to take another really ugly turn. Before my case could even go to trial, Markoff and Shimmy were cashing in on the story. They had already written a book about it together in 1996; now they had sold the movie rights to that book, for a film to be called Takedown.
Luckily, one of the costume designers working on the film leaked a copy of the screenplay for Takedown to 2600 magazine. When I read the script, it literally turned my stomach. The screenwriters had cast me as an evil villain and portrayed me as doing things I had never done in real life, such as hacking into hospitals and endangering patients’ lives by altering their medical records. I was horrified.
One particularly preposterous scene even showed me violently assaulting Shimmy by grabbing a metal trash-can cover and slamming him over the head with it. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine either one of us engaging in such a ridiculous fight.
When he saw the script, Eric Corley wrote online that it was “far worse than I had ever imagined.” If it were made into a film, he said, “Kevin will be forever demonized in the eyes of the public.”
In an article for ZDTV, Kevin Poulsen wrote,
Nobody predicted that the script, supposedly based on the dry, but inoffensive book of the same name, would be filled with so much blatant fabrication. No one expected that Kevin Mitnick might become the most feared and hated screen villain since Hannibal Lecter.
Appalled by the false portrayal of me in the movie script, my supporters picketed Miramax Studios in New York on July 16, 1998. Eric Corley brought international media attention to the fact that the script was filled with blatant lies. Eric was also responsible for getting the word out about the civil liberties issues its release would raise for my case. All of us were concerned that the movie would prejudice my trial.
During a phone call we had around that time, while I was still in pretrial detention, Alex Kasperavicius told me that Brad Weston, one of the producers of Takedown, was very eager to talk with me. I agreed to let Alex three-way Weston onto our call. Brad said he wanted my cooperation on the film. He also said that Skeet Ulrich, who had been cast to play me, wanted to speak with me.
I told Brad that I had read the script and found it to be mostly false and defamatory. I said I was planning to hire an attorney. Brad said the production company would gladly pick up my attorney’s fees; they would prefer to settle with me as soon as possible, rather than run the risk that a court case might delay the release of the film.
Two well-known Los Angeles libel attorneys, Barry Langberg and Debbie Drooz, saw that some, though not all, of the absurdly false stuff was removed from the script. They also secured a decent settlement for me, though I’m not allowed to disclose the details.
Because that settlement came in before my criminal case was resolved, there was some concern that the judge might seize the money as part of a restitution payment. My attorney declared the income in camera (meaning for the judge’s eyes only), and the judge allowed me to keep it private. So the prosecutors never learned that I had received money from the producers