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Then: “I think it’s ‘1313,’ ” he said.

For the next two or three minutes, we all stood there frozen while Santos—and the four of us—listened to his voicemail messages. After he hung up, I called his voicemail access number and entered “1313” as his password.

It worked.

We were stoked! Dave, Lewis, Terry, and I all jumped around high-fiving one another.

Terry and I went through the same process and eventually got Lilly Creek’s voicemail password as well.

I began making it a daily routine to check both their voicemails, always after hours, when I could be fairly certain they wouldn’t be trying to call in at the same time themselves: getting a message that their voicemail box was in use would be a huge red flag.

Over the next several weeks, I listened to a series of messages left by Detective Simon, updating Santos on his investigation of Teltec. It was reassuring for my bosses to know that the detective wasn’t coming up with anything new. (In another of those improbable small-world coincidences, Detective Simon—still with the LA Sheriff’s Department, now as a Reserve Chief—is the twin brother of my coauthor, Bill Simon.)

In the middle of all this, every now and then I’d recall that tantalizing piece of information I’d been given about one of the charges against Kevin Poulsen, for a hack that Eric said he had taken part in: the radio contest that had supposedly won Eric a Porsche, and Poulsen himself two more. At other odd moments, I’d remember the contest I’d heard on the radio while driving to Vegas that dreary day not long after my half-brother’s death. Finally those two items collided in my brain.

Eric had told Lewis and me that Poulsen’s radio contest gambit was based on hacking into the phone company switch at the central office that handled the radio station’s lines. I thought there might be a way to do the same kind of thing without even having to mess with the switch. KRTH broadcast from offices not too far from Dave’s, and both were served by the same central office.

To start, I’d need a phone number other than the 800 number the disk jockey gave out on the air. Calling an internal department at PacBell, I asked for the “POTS number” for the 800 number. (“POTS” stands for—are you ready for this?—“plain old telephone service”; it’s a standard, everyday term used around the phone company.) I needed the POTS number because the 800 number used for the radio contest had a “choke” placed on it, limiting the flow of calls that could come in from each part of the station’s broadcast area, and my plan wouldn’t work if any of my calls were being choked. The lady I was talking to didn’t even ask what my name was or whether I worked for Pacific Bell; she just gave me the number.

At Dave Harrison’s, I programmed the speed calling feature on four of his phone lines, so that all I had to do to dial directly in to the POTS number at the radio station was press “9#.” I was counting on the fact that calls routed through the 800 number would take just a bit longer to connect. Then, too, the numbers for Dave’s office were switched through the same central office as the station’s POTS number, meaning that our calls would be completed instantaneously. But would those minuscule advantages, plus using multiple telephone lines, be enough to make a difference?

Once this was all set up, Lewis, Terry Hardy, Dave, and I each sat at a phone, ready to call. We could hardly wait for the contest to be announced. Caller number seven was always the winner. We just had to keep calling in until one of us was the seventh caller.

As soon as we heard the cue to start calling—the jingle “the best oldies on radio”—we quickly punched in “9#.” Every time we got through and heard the DJ say, “You’re caller number ____,” and give a number less than seven, we’d disconnect and quickly dial “9#” again. Over and over.

The third time I speed-dialed, I heard, “You’re caller number seven!”

I shouted into the phone, “I won! No way, I won? Are you kidding me? I can’t believe it!