Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [48]
I continued to sit in solitary while attorney Alan Rubin negotiated with the prosecutor about the terms of a plea bargain that would let me get out of prison without a trial. I was being charged with breaking into DEC and possessing MCI access codes, causing DEC a loss of $4 million—an absurd claim. Digital’s actual losses were related to the investigation of the incident; the $4 million figure was an arbitrary number chosen for the purpose of sentencing me to a lengthy prison term under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. My punishment should really have been based on the cost of the licensing fees I hadn’t paid for the source code I’d copied, which would have been much, much less.
Still, I wanted to settle the case and get out of my coffinlike cell as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to stand trial because I knew the Feds had easily enough evidence to convict me: they had my notes and disks, they had Lenny’s eagerness to testify against me, they had the tape from a body wire Lenny had worn during our last hacking session.
At last my attorney worked out a deal with the Federal prosecutors that would result in my serving a one-year prison term. They also wanted me to testify against Lenny. That came as a shock, since I’d always heard that the guy who squealed first would get off easy, maybe without even doing any time at all. But the Feds now wanted to nail their own snitch, and my former friend. Sure, I said. Lenny had given evidence against me, so why shouldn’t I pay him back in kind?
But when we got into court, Judge Pfaelzer apparently was influenced by the many rumors and false allegations that had piled up against me over time. She rejected the plea agreement, deeming it too lenient. Still, she allowed a revised version that gave me one year in jail, followed by six months in a halfway house. I was also required to sit down with DEC’s Andy Goldstein to tell him how we’d hacked into DEC and copied its most coveted source code.
As soon as I said I would accept a plea agreement, I magically lost my “national security threat” status. I was transferred from solitary into the general population. At first it felt almost as good as being released, but then reality quickly reminded me that I was still in jail.
While I was in the general population at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a fellow prisoner, a Colombian drug lord, offered to pay me $5 million cash if I could hack into Sentry, the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ computer system, and get him released. I played along to keep on friendly terms with him, but I had absolutely no intention of going down that road.
Soon I was transferred to the Federal prison camp at Lompoc. What a difference: there was dormitory housing instead of cells, and not even a fence around the place. I was sharing my new digs with the who’s who of white-collar crime. My fellow inmates even included a former Federal judge who had been convicted of tax evasion.
My weight had spiked back up to 240 while I was in solitary, since I had been living mostly on comfort food from the commissary—goodies like Hershey bars dipped in peanut butter. Hey, when you’re in solitary, anything that makes you feel a little better is a good thing, right?
But now, at Lompoc, another inmate, a cool guy named Roger Wilson, talked me into doing lots of walking and exercising as well as eating healthier foods such as rice and veggies and the like. It was hard for me to get started, but with his encouragement, I succeeded. It was the beginning of a change in my lifestyle that would remake me, at least in terms of my body image.
Once when I was sitting on a wooden bench, waiting in line to use the phone, Ivan Boesky sat down next to me with a coffee in hand.