Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [98]
If his story about his motorcycle crash was true and he really was walking around on an artificial leg, the doctors must have done some great job, because I had never seen even the hint of a limp. Or maybe he wasn’t really missing a leg at all but had just found a doctor to make a phony report so he could collect benefits; that might explain how come he never seemed to go off to a job.
I told Ann, “This is a fraud case. Let’s see if we can find his parents’ names.” Eric’s driver’s license said that he was a junior, which made this step a whole lot easier. She looked up all of the people listed as Eric Heinz Sr. with a birth year in the range that I had calculated might be reasonable for Eric’s father. She found one with a birth date of June 20, 1935.
That evening, Teltec coworker Danny Yelin and I met for dinner at Solley’s delicatessen in Sherman Oaks. After we ordered, I went to the pay phone and called the number I had tracked down for Eric Heinz Sr.
What happened next maybe shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. It caught me off guard.
“I’m trying to get hold of Eric,” I said. “I’m a friend of his from high school.”
“Who is this?” the man asked in a suspicious tone. “What’s your name again?”
“Maybe I have the wrong Eric Heinz. Is there an Eric Junior?”
“My son passed away,” he said.
He sounded annoyed, bordering on controlled anger. He said he wanted my phone number, that he would call me back—obviously planning to report me to the authorities and have me investigated. No problem: I gave him the number for the pay phone in the deli and hung up.
He called back immediately. We began our dance again, with me trying to pull him closer, him keeping me at arm’s length.
I asked, “When did he die?”
Then it came out: “My son died as an infant.”
I felt the heat of a big adrenaline rush. The explanation was obvious: “Eric Heinz” was a stolen identity.
Somehow I managed to pull myself together enough to babble something about being sorry for his loss.
So who was he really, this one-legged bullshit artist who was working with the FBI and using a phony name?
Meanwhile I felt the need to satisfy myself that what Eric Heinz Sr. had told me about his son’s dying in infancy was really true. Again with the help of my pal Ann at the Social Security Administration, I tracked down Eric Sr.’s brother, who confirmed the story: Eric Jr. had died in a car accident in 1962, at the age of two, on his way to the Seattle World’s Fair with his mother, who was also killed in the crash.
No wonder Eric Sr. had turned so cold when I claimed his son and I had gone to high school together.
There is a particular kind of satisfaction in following a thread all the way to its end. In this case, that meant getting a copy of Eric Heinz’s death record from the King County Bureau of Vital Statistics, in Seattle. I sent a request, enclosing the nominal fee required, and asked that it be mailed to me at Teltec.
The father and the uncle had been telling me the truth. The “Eric Heinz” I knew was playing a familiar game of infant-identity theft.
Wow! I had finally cracked open the truth about him.
The name “Eric Heinz” was a complete phony.
So then who the fuck was this guy, who was dead but trying to set me up?
Going back over my traffic analysis of FBI cell phone calls, I noticed that McGuire was making a lot of calls to 213 894-0336. I already knew that 213 894 was the area code and exchange for the phones at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. I called the number and found it was the phone for one David Schindler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who had been the prosecutor on the Poulsen case. He’d be just the guy, I thought, who would get assigned to take on the next big Los Angeles hacker case.
So the government apparently already