Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [82]
Hold on now. That wasn’t the only possibility. My new “friend” Eric Heinz might indeed be an agent himself, but on second thought, that was hard to believe—I’d found out by then that he wasn’t just hanging out at rock-and-roll clubs. The crowd he kept company with included our initial intermediary, Henry Spiegel, who had told me he once employed Susan Headley, aka Susan Thunder, that hacking hooker who had pointed a finger at me for breaking into the COSMOS center and once physically cut all the phone lines going to my mom’s condominium complex as an act of vengeance. And there were Eric’s own stories of having sex with a different stripper every night.
No, he sure didn’t sound like a kind of guy who would pass the FBI’s vetting process for would-be agents. So I figured that he probably wasn’t an agent at all. Maybe he was just a guy the Feds had something on, whom they had put to work as a confidential informant—a snitch. But why?
Only one explanation made sense: the FBI was trying to round up some hackers.
The Feds had targeted me before, and made sure the arrest got big media coverage. And now, if my suspicions were correct, the Bureau was dangling a carrot in front of me. By introducing Eric into my life, the agents were doing the equivalent of sticking a bottle of Scotch under the nose of a “reformed” alcoholic to see if they could bump him off the wagon.
Four years earlier, in 1988, USA Today had even superimposed my face over a huge picture of Darth Vader on the front page of its Money section, tarring me as “the Darth Vader of the hacking world” and digging up the old label of “the Darkside Hacker.”
So maybe it shouldn’t seem surprising that the FBI might have decided to make me into a priority.
And it wouldn’t be hard. After all, when I was still just a young man, prosecutors had felt justified in manipulating a judge with that absurd story about my being able to launch a nuclear missile by calling NORAD and whistling into the phone. I felt damned certain they wouldn’t hesitate to do it again now if they had the chance.
The address on Mike Martinez’s cell phone bill turned out to be some attorney’s office in Beverly Hills.
I called the office claiming to be from One City Cellular, Martinez’s cell provider. “Your bill is past due,” I told the girl who answered. “Oh, we don’t pay those bills,” she said. “We just forward them to a post office box in Los Angeles,” and she gave me the box number and the address—the Federal Building at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard. Not good.
My next call was to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, in Pasadena. “I need to send a complaint,” I said. “Who is the inspector for the Westwood area of Los Angeles?”
Using the inspector’s name, I called the post office in the Federal Building, asked for the postmaster, and said, “I need you to look up the application for this P.O. box and give me the name and address of the applicant.”
“That post office box is registered to the FBI here at 11000 Wilshire.”
The news didn’t come as a surprise.
So who was the person who was passing himself off as Mike Martinez? What was his relationship with the FBI?
Even though I was desperate to know how much the government had on me, probing further just didn’t make any sense. It would mean getting deeper and deeper into the situation, making it all the more likely that I would eventually be rounded up and sent back to prison. I couldn’t face that. But could I really resist the urge?
EIGHTEEN
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Have you ever walked down a dark street or through a shopping center parking lot late at night when nobody else is around and had the feeling somebody was following you or watching you?
I bet it sent chills up your spine.
That was how I felt about the mystery of the Wernle and Martinez names. Real