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My road had come to a dead end. I had tried every tactic I knew and gotten nowhere: I didn’t have much more insight into Adam’s death than I’d had when my father first called me about it. I was angry and frustrated, miserable at not being able to give my father and myself the satisfaction of having discovered at least some morsels of useful information.

Closure to this sad episode would come only many years later.

My dad stopped talking to Mitchell, convinced he was responsible for Adam’s death. The two brothers would not speak to each other again until the very end of my father’s life, when he was suffering the ravages of lung cancer.

As I write this, Uncle Mitchell has just died. At the family gathering, one of his ex-wives took me aside. In embarrassment, she said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time. Mitchell wasn’t a nice man. The night that Adam died, Mitchell called me. He was so upset I could hardly understand him. He said he and Adam had been shooting up together and Adam had gotten too big a dose and keeled over. Mitchell panicked. He shook Adam, he put him in the shower, but nothing helped.

“He called me to ask for help. I refused to be involved. So he called a drug dealer he knew, who helped get Adam’s shoes on and carry the body into Adam’s car. They drove in two cars to Echo Park, left Adam dead in his car, and drove away.”

So my father had been right all along. Instead of calling 911, Mitchell had sacrificed a nephew he loved to save his own neck.

I can feel myself getting angry again as I write this.

I had believed all along that Mitchell was somehow involved, yet now, hearing the truth, I felt sick to my stomach that he had been capable of such a thing, and that he had died without ever admitting it. This man whom I had loved and respected and looked up to had not been able, even on his deathbed, to tell me the truth.

TWELVE

You Can Never Hide

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I had become so wrapped up in investigating Adam’s death that I needed a break—something else to focus my attention on that wasn’t so emotional. For me, the diversion I needed wasn’t hard to find: I would go back and tackle Neill Clift, the Brit who had been finding all the security holes in DEC’s VMS operating system. How could I trick him into giving me all the security bugs he had found?

From messages I had been reading, I knew that Clift had long craved a job at DEC; maybe that could be my opening. I duped British Telecom into giving me his unlisted home telephone number and called him, introducing myself as Derrell Piper, the name of an actual Digital software engineer in VMS Development. I told him, “We’ve got a hiring freeze right now, but despite that we may be hiring some security engineers. Your name came up because you’ve been so helpful in finding security vulnerabilities and sharing them with us.” And I went on to talk to him about some DEC manuals I knew he wanted.

At the end of the call, I said, “Well, nice talking to you, it’s been a long time.”

Oops—big mistake. The two men had never spoken before.

Later I would learn that Neill called well-known security consultant Ray Kaplan, who he knew had interviewed me on his “Meet the Enemy” conference series. Ray played a portion of the tape.

Neill had to listen for only a few moments before confirming, “Yes—the guy who called me was Kevin Mitnick.” The next time we spoke, Ray told me, “I guess you’re still doing some social engineering.”

Confused, I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Neill called me. I played a piece of the interview I did with you. He recognized your voice and said you’ve been calling him.”

Of course, all this time I was also still in contact with Eric Heinz, who kept bringing up Kevin Poulsen’s name. I had never met Poulsen but had read enough and heard enough to admire his hacking achievements. It was strange that we had never