Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [49]
“I didn’t do it for the money; I did it for the entertainment,” I replied.
He said something like, “You’re in prison, and you didn’t make any money. Isn’t that stupid?” Like he was looking down his nose at me. At that exact moment, I happened to spot a roach floating in his coffee. Smiling, I pointed at it and said, “This place isn’t like the Helmsley, is it?”
Boesky never answered. He just got up and walked away.
After almost four months at Lompoc, I was coming up for release to the halfway house, a place called “Beit T’Shuvah.” I was told the name was Hebrew for “House of Return.” Beit T’Shuvah used the 12-step program, designed for people with drug, alcohol, and other addictions.
My imminent move to a halfway house was the good news. The bad news was that a Probation Officer had called Bonnie to make an appointment to “inspect” the apartment she was then living in, explaining that he had to approve my future living arrangements before I was released. For Bonnie, that was the last straw. She felt she had been through enough and couldn’t dance this dance anymore. “You don’t need to inspect my apartment,” she told the guy. “My husband won’t be living here.” On her next visit, she gave me the bad news: she was filing for divorce.
She now says, “It was a very painful time for me. I thought I had failed. It was scary. I was too afraid to leave Kevin, but too afraid to stay. The fear of staying just became too big.”
I was stunned. We had been planning to spend the rest of our lives together, and now she had changed her mind just as I was nearing release. I felt as if a ton of bricks had been dropped on me. I was really hurt, and totally shocked.
Bonnie agreed to come to the halfway house for a couple of marriage-counseling sessions with me. They didn’t help.
I was deeply disappointed about her decision to end our marriage. What could account for her sudden change of heart? There must be another guy, I thought—somebody else was in the picture. I figured that by checking out the messages on her answering machine, I could find out who it was. I felt bad about doing it, but I needed to know the truth.
I knew Bonnie’s answering machine was a RadioShack product because I recognized the jingle it played to prompt the caller to leave a message. I also knew that with this particular machine, you could retrieve messages remotely, but only if you had the handheld device that came with it, which emitted a special set of tones to turn on the playback. How could I get around that and listen to her messages without the remote beeper?
I called a RadioShack store and described the type of answering machine she had, then added that I had lost my beeper and needed to buy another. The salesman said there were four possible beepers for the various models of that particular answering machine—A, B, C, and D—each of which played a different sequence of tones. I said, “I’m a musician, so I’ve got a good ear.” He wanted me to come down to the store, but I couldn’t leave the halfway house because new arrivals weren’t permitted to leave the premises for the first thirty days they were there. I pleaded with him to open one of each type, put batteries in the remotes, and then play each remote so I could hear it.
My persistence paid off: the guy went to the trouble of setting up the four remotes and playing each of their tones for me. I had a microcassette-tape recorder running the whole time, pressed to the telephone receiver.
Afterward, I called Bonnie’s phone and played back the tones through the receiver. The third one did the trick. I heard Bonnie leave a message on her own phone, presumably from work. After the call had gone to the machine, some guy in her apartment picked up, and the tape recorded both sides of their conversation as she told him about “how great it was to spend time with you.”
Eavesdropping