Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [44]
“You know that feeling in your stomach when you’re about to get arrested?” Lenny taunted. “Well, get ready!”
The whole garage was suddenly filled with the sounds of car engines. Cars shot out at us from what seemed like every direction, stopping in a circle around us. Guys in suits jumped out and started screaming at me, “FBI!”
“You’re under arrest!”
“Hands on the car!”
If Lenny had staged all this just to scare me, I thought, it was an impressive display.
“You guys aren’t FBI. Show me your ID.”
They pulled out their wallets and flipped them open. FBI badges all around me. The real thing.
I looked at Lenny. He was dancing in a little circle of joy, as if he were celebrating some kind of victory over me.
“Lenny, why would you do this to me?”
As an agent handcuffed me, I asked Lenny to call my mom and tell her I’d been arrested. The bastard didn’t even do that one last small bit of kindness for me.
I was driven by two agents to the Terminal Island Federal Prison. I had never seen anything like this outside of a movie or a television show: long rows of open cells, with guys hanging their arms out of the bars. Just the sight of it made me feel like I was dreaming, having a nightmare. But the other prisoners surprised me by being cool and friendly, offering to lend me some stuff that was sold in the commissary and the like. A lot of them were white-collar guys.
But I couldn’t shower. I felt disgusting by the time some FBI agents finally picked me up and took me to FBI headquarters in West Los Angeles, where they took a mug shot of me. I knew I looked a mess—unshowered, uncombed, wearing the same clothes I’d been in for three days, and having slept badly each night on a small cot. At least that picture was to give me some small comfort at a crucial time later on.
After being held over the weekend, I was taken before Magistrate Venetta Tassopulos for my initial detention hearing on Monday morning, expecting to be released on bail. I was assigned a court-appointed lawyer, who asked if I’d been a fugitive. It turned out he’d already talked to the prosecutor, who told him I’d fled to Israel back in 1984, which wasn’t true.
Once the hearing began, I sat there in disbelief as the Court got an earful from the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Leon Weidman. Weidman told the judge, “This thing is so massive, we’re just running around trying to figure out what he did.” Among other things, he said that I had:
hacked into the NSA and obtained classified access codes
disconnected my former Probation Officer’s phone
tampered with a judge’s TRW report after receiving unfavorable treatment
planted a false news story about Security Pacific National Bank’s having lost millions of dollars, after I had an employment offer withdrawn
repeatedly harassed and turned off the phone service of actress Kristy McNichol
hacked into Police Department computers and erased my prior arrest records.
Every one of these claims was blatantly false.
The allegation that I had hacked into the NSA was totally ridiculous. On one of the floppy disks seized by the Santa Cruz police was a file labeled “NSA.TXT.” It was the “whois” output listing all the registered users of Dockmaster, the unclassified National Security Agency computer system that Lenny had social-engineered himself into when he worked at Hughes Aircraft. Everything in the file was public information, including the lists of telephone extensions at the National Computer Security Center. The prosecutor, who obviously didn’t understand what he was looking at, was characterizing public telephone extensions as “classified access codes.” Unbelievable.
Another allegation, the claim that I’d hacked into police computers and deleted my arrest record, was related to my Santa Cruz Operations hacking case, but the missing