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My supervised release was due to end in another several months. By the time the Feds finally lost patience with waiting for my European hack to happen, those months would have passed, and it would be too late for them to simply pick me up and ship me back to prison for violation of the terms of my release.

Would they really wait that long? I could only hope so. Lewis reported a couple of days later that he had mentioned my big European hack to Eric, who had pressed him for details. Lewis told him that I had said it was so big, I didn’t want to tell him any more about it.

Spring had turned into summer, and I was beginning to feel settled in as a Los Angelino once again. But my living arrangements needed some attention. At first, moving in with my dad had felt like a way to begin making up for all those years when he was living two thousand miles away and building a life with a new family. I had taken over Adam’s room, partly out of a sense of wanting to help my dad and be with him in that difficult time after Adam’s death, and because I was hoping we would become closer.

But it hadn’t worked out as I had hoped, not by a mile. We had some good times together but we also had long stretches that felt more like my early years, when our relationship was a battlefield covered with land mines.

We all make concessions when we live with others. And though it’s a cliché, it’s also true that we don’t get to pick our relatives. But somewhere there’s a line in the sand between what we choose to ignore and put up with, and what makes the days seem just too annoying. As various women in my life have made perfectly clear, I’m not so easy to live with myself, so I’m sure the fault here wasn’t all on one side.

It finally got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore, irked by my dad’s frequent complaints that I spent too much time on the phone, but even more irked by his fetish for precision. I like to live in a clean and straightened-up place, but for him it was an obsession. If you remember Felix, the character in The Odd Couple, played by Jack Lemmon in the movie and Tony Randall on television, you’ll recall that he was a neat freak with an obsessive aversion to the least disarray.

Felix was a pussycat compared with my dad.

One example will prove my point: my father actually used a tape measure to make sure that the hangers in his closet were evenly spaced at exactly one inch apart.

Now multiply that fussiness and apply it to every detail in a three-bedroom apartment, and you’ll begin to understand the sort of nightmare I was living.

In the spring of 1992, I gave up and decided to move out. I was happy to stay in the same complex, close enough to see my dad regularly but not so close that I was still living under his thumb. I didn’t want Dad to think I was turning my back on him.

I was stunned when the lady in the rental office told me there was a waiting list and it might be a couple of months before a unit became available for me. Thankfully, I wasn’t stuck at my dad’s: Teltec’s Mark Kasden agreed to let me move into his guest bedroom until my name came to the top of the waiting list for a unit of my own.

After I settled into my new digs, I embarked on another counter-surveillance project. From Dave Harrison’s office, using my new laptop, I decided to see what I could pick up by using SAS to listen in on the phone conversations of Pacific Bell’s manager of Security, John Venn. I popped onto Venn’s line every now and then. Usually when I stumbled across a call in progress, it was about nothing of much interest, and I’d only half listen while doing something else.

But one day that summer I popped in on his line when he was in the middle of a conference call with several colleagues. If this were a scene in a movie, you’d probably groan because the chance of its really happening would seem so remote. It really did happen, though: my ears pricked up when one of the men mentioned “Mitnick.” The conversation was fascinating, revealing… and encouraging. It turned out these guys had no idea how I was defeating all their systems