Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [46]
In Time magazine’s issue of January 9, 1989, an item under the heading of “Technology” noted: “Even the most dangerous criminal suspects are usually allowed access to a telephone, but not Kevin Mitnick—or at least not without being under a guard’s eye. And then he is permitted to call only his wife, mother and lawyer. The reason is that putting a phone in Mitnick’s hands is like giving a gun to a hit man. The twenty-five-year-old sometime college student is accused by Federal officials of using the phone system to become one of the most formidable computer break-in artists of all time.”
“Like giving a gun to a hit man”—said of a guy whose only weapons were computer code and social engineering!
I would have another chance to plead my case. The hearing before a magistrate concerns only the initial decision about detention. In the Federal system, you then “go to the wheel,” and a Federal judge is assigned to your case at random (thus “the wheel”). I was told I was lucky to get Judge Mariana Pfaelzer. Not quite.
The new attorney who had been assigned to me, Alan Rubin, tried to argue that I shouldn’t be housed in solitary confinement, which was intended for inmates who committed violent acts in prison or were a threat to the prison itself. Judge Pfaelzer said, “That’s exactly where he belongs.”
Now I was taken to the brand-new, just-opened Federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, where I was escorted up to the eighth floor, Unit 8 North, and introduced to my new home, a space about eight feet by ten, dimly lit, with one narrow vertical slit of a window through which I could see cars, the train station, people walking around free, and the Metro Plaza hotel, in which, seedy though it probably was, I longed to be. I couldn’t even see the guards or other prisoners, since I was closed in not by bars but by a steel door with a slot that my food trays were slid through.
The loneliness was mind-numbing. Prisoners who have to stay in the hole for extended periods often lose contact with reality. Some never recover, living the rest of their lives in a dim never-never-land, unable to function in society, unable to hold a job. To get an idea of what it’s like, picture being trapped for twenty-three hours a day in a closet lit by only a single forty-watt bulb.
Whenever I left my cell, even to walk just ten feet to the shower, I had to be shackled in leg irons and handcuffs, treated the same way as a prisoner who had violently assaulted a guard. For “exercise,” I would be shuffled once a day to a kind of outdoor cage, not much more than twice the size of my cell, where for an hour I could breathe fresh air and do a few push-ups.
How did I survive? Visits from my mom, dad, grandmother, and wife were all I had to look forward to. Keeping my mind active was my salvation. Since I wasn’t in the hole for violating prison rules, the strict guidelines for prisoners in solitary were relaxed a little for me. I could read books and magazines, write letters, listen to my Walkman radio (favorites: KNX 1070 News radio and classic rock). But writing was difficult because I was allowed only a short pencil, too stubby to use for more than a few minutes at a time.
But even in solitary, in spite of the court’s best efforts, I managed to do a bit of phone phreaking. I was allowed phone calls to my attorney, my mom, my dad, and Aunt Chickie, as well as to Bonnie, but only when she was at home at her apartment, not at work. Sometimes I’d long to talk to her during the day. In order to make a call, I had to be shackled and walked to a hallway that had a bank of three pay phones. The guard would take the restraints off once we reached the phone area, and would sit in a chair five feet away, facing the wall of phones.
Calling anyone not listed in the court order would seem impossible, short of trying to bribe the guard—and I knew that would be a shortcut to getting