The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (12 page)

By the time she serves our entrees, De Payne has entered her name,
food and drink preferences, and days off into his old-fashioned little
black book.

"She seems nice," I offer.

"It's just practice, Jon. Just practice."

It's midnight. We're sitting on the worn carpet in De Payne's living
room, rummaging through a shoe box of old cassettes from his an-
swering machine. De Payne's searching for a recording of an oath he
made with Mitnick a decade and a half ago.

"Kevin has talent," De Payne declares reverently, popping the
tapes in and out of an old cassette player. "The most accurate defini-
tion of Kevin is a sociopath. He'll pursue his obsession without con-
sideration of anything. They're never going to find Kevin," De Payne
insists. "They're never going to find him."

De Payne plays a recording of his pickup artist guru, Ross Jeffries.
NLP is what De Payne calls it, Neurolinguistic Programming. I have
no idea what NLP really means, but I know what it means for De
Payne. It's what he just performed on the waitress. It's the ultimate
hack, talking women into going to bed with a computer nerd.

De Payne hands me a copy of the pickup artist's catalog, advertising
Jeffries's
Speed Seduction
home study course, plus
The Slut Report,
Secrets of a Marathon Lover,
and
How to Be the Jerk Women Love.

De Payne keeps shuffling through cassettes, searching for Mit-
nick's pledge.

"This is it!" he finally exclaims, pressing play.

The tape crackles, and then booms with the boisterous voice of an
excited, sixteen-year-old Kevin Mitnick.

"The agreement states that every number we get — except
GIRLS, only girls on party lines that are not well known —
everything else goes between us. Whatever we get. And no number
one crap. Everything and there it is!"

"OK. Date it!" orders a subdued, then nineteen-year-old Lewis
De Payne.

"What's the date?" wonders a spacy Mitnick.

"April —" begins Lewis.

"It's April, around April twentieth," guesses Mitnick.

"Eighteenth, 1979," corrects a perturbed Lewis.

"Nineteen seventy-nine, at the twentieth century —" gushes Mit-
nick.

Lewis cuts him short. "Yeah, OK."

A month passes. I return to L.A. for more interviews. I acquire a
copy of the SAS manual, the secret wiretapping system that Eric
tipped Mitnick off to. I interview David Schindler, the Assistant U.S.
Attorney, in his eleventh-floor office at the Federal Building. The
very week I am in Los Angeles, March 21 through 26, the FBI mis-
takenly grabs a fat kid and a longhair at a Chicago computer confer-
ence, thinking it's captured Mitnick and Agent Steal in one lucky
sweep. But the twenty-three-year-old Jewish kid's prints don't match
Mitnick's, and when the FBI asks the longhair to pull up his trouser
legs, they see he's got two healthy legs. Meanwhile, my
L.A. Times article and proposed book on Kevin Poulsen has been optioned for a
movie. This doesn't hurt my efforts to dig deeper into the Mitnick
story. In Los Angeles, the prospect of a movie means far more than a
book to hackers and feds.

De Payne and I are dining at his favorite restaurant. It's March 23,
1994. The blond waitress greets him by his first name.

"So the feds were looking into what Kevin was doing?" I ask.

De Payne tells me the feds were worried Mitnick might turn into a
star detective and start invading people's privacy on a large scale.
Mitnick was working for a detective firm that had been busted for
illegally running TRW reports on people. And Mitnick was perform-
ing very well for them. De Payne says he could find people or assets
in a couple of hours while other detectives would spin their wheels
for days.

"Did they want Eric to build a case against Kevin and his company
[Teltec] ?" I ask. " Or was it mainly just to build a case against Kevin?"

"Kevin," De Payne answers. "But you know, don't forget me.
They didn't seem to like me either for some reason."

De Payne's remark doesn't strike me as odd at all — for a hacker.
He wants to be recognized as a hacker, wanted as a hacker, even if
that means attention from the FBI.

The waitress serves us the apple pie she'd like to eat with Lew. I
decide it's time to make a leap. We've broken bread together, lis-
tened to Ross Jeffries Speed Seduction tapes, and joked about Eric.
Time to get serious.

"What happens if someone wants to speak by phone to Kevin?" I
carefully inquire.

De Payne considers my request for a moment.

"So if you were to speak to Kevin, what would you say to him?"

"Well, you know Eric's started calling me. I figure we know some-
one in common."

De Payne gets up and walks to a pay phone by the bathroom. I
bite into my slice of pie.

Five minutes later, De Payne returns, a distracted look on his face.

"We'll have to sit here for a while, Jon. We may have to sit here
for a half an hour."

And so we wait for Kevin Mitnick to phone.

The phone startles me, and I
stumble out of bed to pick up
the portable. It's Eric again, calling at about four in the morning on
Thursday, the last day of March, 1994.

"Be very careful about what you hear about my current activities,
because I am in the process of disinformation," Eric threatens in a
calm, even tone. "Everything that you hear about my whereabouts
or activities may not be true."

Eric may be a fugitive on the run, but when it comes to his story,
he's in total control. He pauses a moment and then coolly orders,
"Stand by. There's some movement here. . . ."

Have they already trapped and traced the call? Is the FBI moving
in for the bust? Should I hang up?

"It was nothing," Eric deadpans a few seconds later.

I've climbed the steep steps to my cluttered attic office, switched
on the lamp, and booted up my Macintosh. I'm in my pajamas.

"So how badly do the feds want you?"

"I think they don't care. Schindler probably does, but I think
he realizes he's got a can of worms on his hands if he finds me. I'm
one of the few defendants that has ever had extensive personal
phone calls with Schindler. We've been very much on a first-name

basis for some time. It makes him very nervous now that I'm out
here."

■ ■ ■

Eric makes his smooth, Hollywood sales pitch.

"You have the opportunity right now to buy the complete rights to
my story," Eric pours it on. "Right now, every penny counts. The more
money I have, the more free I feel to spend money on security measures."

I mention that Phillip Lamond, one of Eric's Hollywood rock-
and-roll pals, told me he was living the high life.

"I'm doing fine, but I don't like taking chances. I'm not a greedy
person. There's a lot of things I could do to make a lot of money if I
really wanted to stick my balls on the line.

"HELLOOOO! If you touch the FUCKIN' car I will KILL you!"

The line is silent. When Eric returns a few seconds later, he
doesn't explain his outburst. Some poor schmuck must have gotten
too close to Eric's wheels.

The incident doesn't faze Eric. He's moving in for the closer, like
the pitchman on a late-night TV offer.

"This offer is only going to be available for about thirty days. After
that it's not going to be a concern to me. Money in my pocket right now
will help me. I'm talking about cash within about thirty days."

I don't say anything.

"It is very risky for me to be talking to you at all," Eric says. "Not
to mention the information, but the mere phone call itself. I think
we're OK at this point. After spending forty-five minutes on the
phone with you, nothing happened.

"Have you talked with the FBI?" Eric probes.

"No."

"So how did he [Phillip Lamond] give you the impression that I
was doing OK?"

"He said you were driving a BMW and seemed to have plenty of
money."

"Phillip has such a big mouth. If I was a killer, I'd fuckin' BLOW
his brains out."

Five thousand dollars cash, that's what the cyberfugitive wants. In
return, I'd get one hundred percent access. Meet him in person while
he's on the run, be granted unlimited interviews, receive a copy of his
memoirs, and get phone numbers of his friends. When I mention that
this sounds an awful lot like aiding and abetting a fugitive, Eric casu-
ally contradicts everything he's just said, and calmly assures me I
would certainly not be giving him money to flee. He, like Mitnick, is
practiced in the art of social engineering. Eric's trying to con me.

"Can you hold on a second?" Eric asks.

"Sure."

I wait a couple of minutes, long enough to start thinking about
how cold I am.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Eric jokes, imitating an operator.
"How may I process your call?"

Eric's slightly out of breath, but he's jazzed. "You'll never believe
what I just did!

"There was this air compressor that kept going off every ten sec-
onds. I walked over to this fenced-in area. I broke into it, shut the
valves off, turned the pressure way down, and pulled this pin and
released the pressure, and it blew up in my face!"

Suddenly Eric is serious.

"If I came in right now it would be three to five. I don't see the
point. It's not going to teach me any lessons.

"If you dropped a hundred dollars on the floor, I would pick it up
and hand it back to you. But if you're the federal government and
you dropped a thousand dollars, or you're stupid, I'm going to take
advantage of it."

How did Eric come to have this cynical worldview? He talks re-
luctantly about his upbringing in an upper-middle-class suburb of
Washington, D.C. His father was a chiropractor, fond of auto rac-
ing, his mother an accountant. "Dad's got a couple mil, mom's got
maybe a mil invested."

They divorced when Eric was twelve.

"I was an unwelcome child. That's caused a lot of problems in my
life. I know it's kind of stupid to blame your childhood for your
problems, but there's no question in my mind we are a product of
our —

"Hang on a second!" he interrupts his own monologue.

The seconds turn into minutes.

"That was pretty scary," Eric returns, sounding shaken. "I was at
this bar with like two thousand people and now like the parking lot
is empty, and it's almost spooky. I've got to call this girl real quick,
and I'll call you back."

■ ■ B

I rush down the stairs to pull on a jacket. We've been talking for
nearly two hours and the last half hour I've spent shivering in my
chair. I check a clock. It's about a quarter till six. The sun will rise in
less than an hour.

Ten minutes pass. I pick up on the first ring. Eric's voice is
changed.

"There are so many things I have yet to experience, places I need
to be," Eric says, suddenly melancholy. "I want to leave something
behind. I really feel I have a positive influence to leave. I really feel I
can make up for what I've taken and I just don't feel I deserve to go
to jail. Granted, life's not fair, and there are a lot of really good
people that are suffering. But that just makes me want to do what I
can with my life."

Eric Heinz, cyberpunk, worrying about the fate of the downtrod-
den masses? I don't believe him for a second. I change the subject to
a topic Eric is more qualified to comment on.

"What's the difference between hacking a radio station and an
individual?"

"I think I am a bit more karmic in my beliefs. It's just a conscience
thing. I would feel grief if I were to cause somebody great grief just
for my mere profit. Because money, although I like it, is not that
important."

•
m
a

Eric's telling me how he and Kevin Poulsen investigated the Pac Bell
security man bent on capturing them. "Actually it was really ironic
because Poulsen and Mitnick both are the same way."

"Investigating the investigators?" I ask.

"Yes. It's something we were using to attempt to catch Mitnick at

one point. We started making it look like he might get caught. Or
things were heating up on his investigation, and he'd start taking
risks to find out what's going on, whereas normally he would be very
stealthful and very careful."

"Why do you think Mitnick had to know?"

"One of the reasons you become a computer hacker, and this is a
very important point that you should know, is because you want
control. You want to know what's going on in your life. You want
to be able to control your life."

"Is that important to you?"