Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [58]
If the cops weren’t going to do anything, I would have to be the vigilante investigator.
I took over Adam’s old room and dived into researching the phone company records. My best guesses were the two people I had been calling when I first heard from Dad: Adam’s closest friend, Kent, whom he was supposed to be with on his last weekend; and, unhappily, my uncle Mitchell, who had already destroyed his own life with dope. Adam had become very close to Uncle Mitchell. My dad had a hunch that Mitchell had played a role in Adam’s death, maybe even been responsible for it.
At the funeral, the viewing took place in a separate room. I went in alone and found Adam laid out in an open coffin. Being at the funeral of someone close to me was a new and emotionally difficult experience. I remember how different he looked—unrecognizable. I just kept hoping that I was trapped in some sort of cruel nightmare. I was alone in a room with my only brother, and I would never again be able to speak with him. It’s a cliché, I know, but my sadness made me realize how little time we really have in this life.
One of my first tasks in LA was to contact the Probation Officer to whom my case had been transferred, Frank Gulla. Late fortyish, with a medium build and a friendly, calm personality, he was even relaxed about the rules—for example, not insisting on our “required” monthly visits after he got to know me. When I would finally get around to showing up at his office, he’d have me fill out the monthly reports that I had missed, and we’d backdate them. I don’t suppose he was that lax with guys charged with more serious crimes, but I appreciated his being so casual with me.
I threw myself into the investigation. Dad and I both suspected Adam’s friend Kent knew more than he was telling us. Was he perhaps relieving his conscience by opening up to other people? If so, was he careless enough to do it over the telephone? With my friend Alex, I drove to Long Beach, where Kent lived. After a little snooping at a nearby apartment complex, I found what I needed: a phone line not currently wired to the phone of any customer. One call to the local CO was all it took to get a tech to “punch down” a connection from Kent’s line to the unused phone line, turning it, in effect, into a secret extension of his phone. Alex and I set up a voice-activated tape recorder inside the phone company’s terminal box to capture every word spoken on both ends of Kent’s calls.
For the next several days, I made the hour-and-a-half trek from my dad’s place to the apartment building with the hidden recorder in Long Beach. Each time I’d retrieve the previous day’s tape, replace it with a fresh one, and pop the microcassette into my portable tape player to listen to Kent’s conversations as I drove back to Dad’s. In vain. Hours and hours of effort, and nothing to show for it.
Meanwhile I was also piecing together a picture of people Uncle Mitchell had been talking to in the hours before Adam’s death. I was able to social-engineer employees at PacTel Cellular and get his call detail records, hoping these would show me whether Mitchell had been making calls one after another, suggesting a sense of urgency or panic, or calls to other friends he might have been asking for help.
Nothing.
I tried PacTel Cellular again, hoping to find out which cell phone sites Mitchell’s calls had been relayed through, which might show whether he had been near Echo Park, where Adam’s body had been abandoned. But I couldn’t find anyone who knew how to access the records I wanted. Either PacTel wasn’t storing that data, or I just wasn’t managing to find the people who knew which system had access to the database it was in and how to retrieve it.
All in a