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For Lewis and me, listening to wiretaps was a game, a lark. For Pacific Bell Security investigators, it was part of the job. But one of the investigators, Darrell Santos, was in for a surprise. He came in to work one morning, went to have a listen to what had transpired on the intercepts he had placed on my dad’s lines, and discovered that all of the Pacific Bell’s electronic surveillance had stopped in its tracks. There were no audio intercepts; everything was dead. Santos called the Calabasas frame and asked, “Are our boxes still working there?”

“Oh, no,” he was told. “Security from Los Angeles called and told us to disconnect them.”

Santos told the technician, “We don’t do any electronic surveillance out of Southern California: we do it all out of Northern California. So there’s no such thing as Los Angeles Security.”

That night Santos flew from his home base in San Francisco to Los Angeles and reattached all the surveillance boxes himself. To make sure nobody could be conned into disconnecting them again, he hid the boxes in the rafters above the racks of switching equipment.

Much later, in an interview for this book, Santos would recall, “This was a real big deal for us because now it hit home, it was personal. Kevin was listening to our calls, when we were in the business of trying to listen to his calls. Then he has our intercepts taken down. So it made us really change how we spoke on the phone and the messages we left. And we had to create some new ways to cover our tracks because we also had to protect the integrity of what law enforcement was doing with us, all of their court-ordered stuff.”

Maybe it was just as well that I didn’t know at the time what headaches I was causing them—otherwise I might not have been able to squeeze my big head through a doorway.

And maybe I would have been flattered to know, back then, that whenever anything like this happened at Pacific Bell, I immediately became the prime suspect. According to Santos, Kevin Poulsen had been number one on their internal most wanted list. Once Poulsen was behind bars, the revised list had a new name at the top: mine. The file they had on me going all the way back to my juvenile days was as thick as a big-city phone directory.

Santos said, “There were other hackers out there doing a lot of other things, but my opinion was that Kevin was the one who everyone was trying to emulate. I thought Kevin was the mouse and I was the cat, but sometimes it was the other way around.”

He added, “There were many leads we’d get from corporate security guys in other companies saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this case, this guy’s getting us, do you think it could be Kevin?’ Every time something would pop up, it was always Kevin they’d suspect.”

As I say, I might’ve been proud to hear some of that back in the day, but just then I was feeling pretty frustrated. So far my talents hadn’t helped me uncover any of Eric Heinz’s backstory. Lewis and I had been going around and around with each other over our doubts concerning him. Sure, he knew lots of stuff about phone company systems and procedures, even some stuff Lewis and I hadn’t been aware of. But A, he wasn’t willing to share much of anything. And B, he was forever asking those kinds of questions, the kinds hackers just don’t ask one another: “Who are you working with?” and “What projects have you been doing lately?” and so on.

It was time for us to meet the guy face-to-face and see if getting to know him a little better would put our suspicions to rest. And if he was for real, maybe he could even help me learn when those taps had been placed on my dad’s lines.

FIFTEEN

“How the Fuck Did You Get That?”

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Surprisingly enough, Eric was more than willing to meet us for dinner. We settled on a few days later at a Hamburger Hamlet near West Los Angeles. Lewis and I were both antsy enough about the meeting that he said he would bring along some