Hella Nation - Evan Wright [108]
The Post gave Warshavsky several hours to send exculpatory information, but he failed to offer any. The story ran with our allegations of deliberate overbilling unchanged.
Several days later, Warshavsky sent my attorney a check to cover the settlement. It bounced.
THE MOST SURPRISING THING about Warshavsky, I realized at the conclusion of the lawsuit, was how little I knew about him and how much I had to learn about the twisted, unlikely and in many ways sad story of his life. When his parents, Harold and Joyce, moved to Seattle, it was not to an elegant East Side suburb but to Ballard, a tough, grimy, working-class neighborhood twenty minutes north of downtown. Harold was a cable-TV installer; Joyce answered phones at an insurance company. They lived in a single-story clapboard home with their brilliant but troubled son, a chubby, hyperactive, attention-starved kid who, recalls Eric Ensign, a sixth-grade classmate, “used to taunt kids to get attention. He had a snort. It always started when he laughed.”
Warshavsky got his first computer in 1985, when he was twelve. In the days before the Web, young Warshavsky set up a bulletin board—a primitive chat room—and started exploring the new world of cyberspace. Hackers he met on bulletin boards traded secrets about how to break into phone systems and get free long-distance services. Armed with this knowledge, Warshavsky blossomed into a tireless phone phreaker—a telephone hacker—and mastered the intricate and laborious processes needed to override switches in the telecommunications grid. According to childhood friend Brian Cartmell, Warshavsky would construct “telephone bridges”—elaborate, illegal teleconferences in which he might bring together as many as sixty people from around the world. Warshavsky admits to certain “instances” when he “used a teleconferencing service and didn’t pay for it.” Warshavsky also says that by his early teens he left home because his parents realized that “they didn’t want the financial burden of raising a teenager.”
What actually happened was that Warshavsky’s parents sent him to a psychiatric facility after the phone company warned them that their son was committing fraud over the phone lines from their home. According to Toni Ames, a former U.S. West investigator who helped build the case against the young Warshavsky, his indiscretions were wide-ranging, sophisticated and serious. Yet Ames, like many people who have known Warshavsky, still has a conflicting view of him. Despite the fact that she helped to bust him, she felt that his parents had “dumped” him and once thought of adopting him herself. “Seth was being set up by older kids, eighteen and nineteen,” Ames says. She recalls visiting Warshavsky in a psychiatric facility. “He was this emaciated little kid who looked like he was ten,” she says. “If you talked to him about his parents, he was in a shell. If you talked about computers, it was like he grew to six feet tall.”
Warshavsky never returned to live at his parents’ house after the age of fourteen. “Seth’s parents never wanted a kid like Seth,” says Cartmell. “I don’t think anyone can imagine how annoying he was back then, with his attention-deficit disorder, his hyperactivity. But you don’t just kick him out of the house and send him to a mental hospital.” Warshavsky’s parents, who still live in Ballard, will only say that these accounts of Seth’s childhood are “inaccurate.” “I always knew Seth would do great things,” says Harold Warshavsky. “I’ve always been proud of him.” When Ames visited Warshavsky in a psychiatric facility