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“No,” he said. “That’s my sister.”

“Well, do you have a son named Joseph?”

“No.” After a moment, he added, “Mary has a son named Joseph Ways. But it couldn’t be him. He lives in California.”

This was coming together; now we were getting somewhere. But there was more: the man on the other end of the phone line was still talking.

“He’s an FBI agent.”

Son of a bitch!

There was no such person as Joseph Wernle Jr. An FBI agent named Joseph Ways had adopted a false identity using real family names that he could easily remember. And that agent was passing himself off as a hacker named Eric Heinz.

Or at least, that was the most likely deduction, based on what I now knew.

The next time I tried to call Eric on his landline telephone, the number was disconnected.

Earlier in my hacking career, there had been a point when I had decided it might come in handy sometime to have access to another of the Los Angeles area’s utility companies, the Department of Water and Power, or DWP. Everybody needs water and electricity, so the utility company seemed like an extremely valuable source for finding out someone’s address.

The DWP maintained a unit known as “Special Desk” to handle calls from law enforcement, staffed by people trained to verify that every caller was on the list of people authorized to receive customer information.

I called the DWP corporate offices claiming to be a cop and explained that our sergeant who had the phone number for Special Desk was on assignment, and we needed to get it again. I was given it without a problem.

Next I called LAPD’s elite SIS division. It seemed only fair to include these guys in the fun since they were the ones who had tailed Lenny and me at Pierce College several years earlier. I asked to speak to a sergeant, and I. C. Davidson came on the line. (I remember his name well, since I continued to use it for a long time, whenever I needed information from the DWP.)

Telling him, “Sergeant, I’m with DWP Special Desk,” I said, “We’re setting up a database of authorized people for law enforcement requests, and I’m calling to find out if any officers in your division still need access to Special Desk.”

He said, “Absolutely.”

I started out, as usual, by asking if he was on the list and getting his name.

“Okay, how many officers do you have who need to be on the list?”

He gave me a number.

“Okay, go ahead and give me their names, and I’ll make sure they’re all authorized for another year.” It was important for his people to have access to the information from the DWP, so he took the time to patiently read off and spell out the names for me.

Some months later, Special Desk added a password to its verification process. No problem: I called up LAPD’s Organized Crime Unit and got a lieutenant on the phone.

Introducing myself as “Jerry Spencer with Special Desk,” I chose as my opening gambit a slightly different version of the earlier one: “By the way, are you authorized for Special Desk?”

He said he was.

“Fine. What’s your name, sir?”

“Billingsley. David Billingsley.”

“Hold on while I look you up on the list.”

I paused a bit and rustled some papers. Then I said, “Oh, yes. Your password is ‘0128.’ ”

“No, no, no. My password is ‘6E2H.’ ”

“Ohhh. I’m sorry, that’s a different David Billingsley.” I could hardly keep from laughing. I then had him look up the list of officers authorized for Special Desk in the Organized Crime Unit and tell me their names and passwords. At that point I was golden forever. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those passwords still worked today.

With this access to DWP Special Desk, it took me only about five minutes to discover Eric’s new address: he had moved to a different apartment in the same building. Lewis and I had shown up at his address, and three weeks later he’s not living in the same apartment anymore and has a new phone number—but he’s in the same building?

And the new phone line is listed in the same name as before, Joseph Wernle. If Eric had really gone into “secure mode,” as he’d told us