Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [80]
The area code and prefix of the monitor number identified which central office the wiretap was in. If Lewis or I knew anyone who had a phone number served out of a CO where a wiretap was active, I would call the central office, say I was from PacBell Security, and explain, “We have one of our boxes there. I need you to trace out the connection.” After a couple of steps I would have the target phone number that the intercept was placed on. If it didn’t belong to anybody I knew, I’d go on to explore the next one.
I kept checking on intercepts as a precaution, watching my back while focused on the crucial task of trying to figure out what Eric was really up to. One approach came to mind that hadn’t occurred to me before. I called the Switching Control Center that managed the switch providing Eric’s telephone service and convinced the tech to perform a line-history block, or LHB, a way of getting a report on the last phone number dialed from a phone line served by a 1A ESS switch.
After that I started calling for LHBs on him up to several times a day, to find out what numbers he was calling.
One of the numbers made me break out in a cold sweat. Eric had called 310 477-6565. I didn’t need to do any research. It was seared into my memory:
The Los Angeles headquarters of the FBI!
Fuuuck.
I called Lewis at work from my cloned cell phone and said, “Turn on your ham radio.” He knew that meant something entirely different: it meant, “Turn on your cloned cell phone.” (He was the kind of person who liked to focus on one thing at a time; when he was addressing the task at hand, he’d turn off his cell phone and pager so they wouldn’t interrupt his train of thought.)
When I got him on the safe cell phone, I told him, “Dude, we’re in trouble. I did an LHB on Eric’s line. He’s fucking calling the FBI.”
He didn’t seem concerned. Entirely without emotion. Whaaaat?!
Well, maybe there was someone else in the office, and he couldn’t react. Or maybe it was that arrogance of his, that attitude of superiority, the notion that he was invulnerable.
I said, “You need to get your floppy disks and notes out of your apartment and office. Anything to do with SAS, you need to stash somewhere safe. I’m gonna be doing the same.”
He didn’t seem to think one phone call to the FBI was such a big deal.
“Just do it!” I told him, trying not to shout.
Common sense dictated my next call, to Pacific Bell’s Customer Name and Location Bureau. The effort was routine but produced an unexpected result. A cheerful young lady took my call and asked for my PIN; I used one that I had nabbed a few months earlier by hacking into the CNL database, then gave her the two phone numbers in Eric’s apartment.
“The first one, 310 837-5412, is listed to a Joseph Wernle, in Los Angeles,” she told me. “And it’s non-pub”—short for “non-published,” meaning a number that the information operator won’t give out. “The second, 310 837-6420, is also listed to Joseph Wernle, and it’s also non-pub.” I had her spell the name for me.
So the “Eric Heinz” name was a phony, and his real name was Joseph Wernle. Or Eric had a roommate… which didn’t actually seem too likely for a guy who claimed to have a different sleepover every night. Or maybe he had just registered the phone under a fake name.
Most likely Eric Heinz was a phony name and Joseph Wernle his real name. I needed to find out who this guy really was, and I needed to do it fast.
Where to start?
The rental application he’d filled out at his apartment complex might have some background information—references or whatever.
The Oakwood Apartments, where Lewis and I had paid him that surprise visit, turned out to be just one in a national string of rental properties owned by a real estate conglomerate. The places were rented to companies putting employees up on a temporary assignment, or people recently transferred to a new city and needing a place to live while looking for new digs. Today the company describes itself as “the world’s largest rental housing solution company.”
To set things