Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [45]
All the other allegations were also false, rehashes of rumors that apparently convinced the magistrate I was a serious threat to national security.
The one that mystified me most was that I had repeatedly had the phone service of the actress Kristy McNichol turned off because I had a crush on her. First of all, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think that turning off someone’s phone would be a good way to demonstrate affection. I never understood how the story got started but the experience had been seared into my memory. I’d had to endure the humiliation of standing in line at the grocery store and seeing my photo plastered on the cover of the National Examiner alongside florid headlines saying I was a crazed stalker obsessed with Kristy McNichol! The feeling in the pit of my stomach as I glanced around me, hoping that none of the other shoppers had recognized me on that cover, is one I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Weeks later, my mom, who then worked at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, saw McNichol having lunch at one of the tables. Mom introduced herself and said, “Kevin Mitnick is my son.”
McNichol immediately said, “Yeah, what’s all this about his turning off my phones?” She said that nothing like that had ever happened to her, and she herself wondered, just as I had, how the rumor had gotten started. Later a private investigator would confirm that none of it had taken place.
When people ask me why I ran, years later, instead of facing the Federal charges against me, I think back on moments like this. What good would it do for me to come clean if my accusers were going to play dirty? When there’s no presumption of fair treatment, and the government is willing to base its charges on superstition and unverified rumors, the only smart response is to run!
When it was his turn to present my case, my court-appointed attorney told the magistrate that I had indeed gone to Israel in late 1984, but that I hadn’t been absconding, just visiting. I was stunned. We had discussed this point ten minutes before my hearing, and I’d explained that I hadn’t been outside the country in years and had in fact never been overseas. Mom, Gram, and Bonnie all looked shocked because they knew that what he was saying just wasn’t true. How could an attorney be so incompetent?
In a last-ditch effort to frighten the magistrate, Leon Weidman made one of the most outrageous statements that have probably ever been uttered by a Federal prosecutor in court: he told Magistrate Tassopulos that I could start a nuclear holocaust. “He can whistle into a telephone and launch a nuclear missile from NORAD,” he said. Where could he have possibly come up with that ridiculous notion? NORAD computers aren’t even connected to the outside world. And they obviously don’t use the public telephone lines for issuing launch commands.
His other claims, every single one of which was false, were tall tales, likely picked up from bogus media reports and who knows what other sources. But I had never heard this NORAD one before, not even in a science-fiction story. I can only think he picked up the notion from the Hollywood hit movie WarGames. (Later it would become widely accepted that WarGames was partly based on my exploits; it wasn’t.)
Prosecutor Weidman was painting a portrait of me as the Lex Luthor of the computer world (which I guess made him Superman!). The whistling-into-the-phone thing was so farfetched that I actually laughed out loud when he said it, certain that Her Honor would tell the man he was being absurd.
Instead, she ordered me held without bail because when “armed with a keyboard” (“armed”!), I posed a danger to the community.
And she added that I was to be held where I would not have any access to a telephone. The living areas assigned to a prison