Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

by Kevin D. Mitnick

“Like giving a gun to a hit man”—said of a guy whose only weapons were computer cod...

In the Federal system, you then “go to the wheel,” and a Federal judge is assigned to your case at random (thus “the wheel”). I was told I was lucky to get Judge Mariana Pfaelzer. Not quite.

The new attorney who had been assigned to me, Alan Rubin, tried to argue that I shouldn’t be housed in solitary confinement, which was intended for inmates who committed violent acts in prison or were a threat to the prison itself. Judge Pfaelzer said, “That’s exactly where he belongs.”

Now I was taken to the brand-new, just-opened Federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, where I was escorted up to the eighth floor, Unit 8 North, and introduced to my new home, a space about eight feet by ten, dimly lit, with one narrow vertical slit of a window through which I could see cars, the train station, people walking ar...

The loneliness was mind-numbing. Prisoners who have to stay in the hole for extended periods often lose contact with reality. Some never recover, living the rest of their lives in a dim never-never-land, unable to function in society, unable to hold a job. To get an idea of what it’s like, picture being trapped for twenty-three hours a day in a closet lit by only a single forty-watt bulb.

Whenever I left my cell, even to walk just ten feet to the shower, I had to be shackled in leg irons and handcuffs, treated the same way as a prisoner who had violently assaulted a guard. For “exercise,” I would be shuffled once a day to a kind of outdoor cage, not much more than twice the size of my cell, where for an hour I could breathe fresh air and do a few push-ups.

Since I wasn’t in the hole for violating prison rules, the strict guidelines for prisoners in solitary were relaxed a little for me. I could read books and magazines, write letters, listen to my Walkman radio (favorites: KNX 1070 News radio and classic rock). But writing was difficult because I was allowed only a short pencil, too stubby to use for more than a few minutes at a time.

But even in solitary, in spite of the court’s best efforts, I managed to do a bit of phone phreaking. I was allowed phone calls to my attorney, my mom, my dad, and Aunt Chickie, as well as to Bonnie, but only when she was at home at her apartment, not at work. Sometimes I’d long to talk to her during the day. In order to make a call, I had to be shackled and walked to a hallway that had a bank of three pay phones. The guard would take the restraints off once we reached the phone area, and would sit in a chair five feet away, facing the wall of phones.

Calling anyone not listed in the court order would seem impossible, short of trying to bribe the guard—and I knew that would be a shortcut to getti...

told the guard, “I want to call my mother,” and he looked up the number in the logbook. He walked the few steps, dialed the phone, and handed it to me. The operator came on and asked my name, then went off the line until my mom answered and agreed to accept a collect call from Kevin, and we were finally connected.

As I was talking with Mom, I would frequently rub my back against the pay phone as if I had an itch. At the end of our conversation, I would then put one hand behind my back, acting like I was scratching my back. With my hand still behind me, while continuing to talk as if carrying on a conversation, I would hold down the switch hook for a few seconds to disconnect the call. Then I would bring my hand back around in front of my body.

After I punched in the new number, I had to time my fake conversation just right, so that when the operator came on and said, “Collect call. Who shall I say is the caller?” the next word I said would be “Kevin”—in a sentence that would sound normal to the guard. (As the operator asked my name, I’d be saying something like, “Well, tell Uncle John that…” The operator would stop talking and wait for me to give my name, just as I was saying “… KEVIN… sends my best.”)

It had worked. I was as excited as if I’d just succeeded with some epic hack. The first time is the hardest. I kept up that routine day after day. It’s a wonder the guard didn’t buy me some lotion for itchy skin.

One night a couple of weeks after I began doing this trick, when I was sleeping, my cell door slid open. Standing there were a bunch of suits: a couple of associate wardens and the captain of the detention center. I was handcuffed, shackled, and hustled off to a conference room thirty feet away. I sat down, and one of the associate wardens asked, “Mitnick, how are you doing it? How are you redialing the phone?” I played dumb, thinking it would be stupid to admit anything. Let them prove it.

The captain chimed in, “We’ve been monitoring your calls. How are you dialing the phone? The CO [Correctional Officer] is watching you at all times.” I smiled and said, “I’m not David Copperfield—how could I possibly ...

He was installing a phone jack in the hallway across from my cell and the next time I asked to make a phone call, I found out why: the guard brought a phone with a twenty-foot handset cord and plugged it into the jack, dialed the authorized number I requested, and then passed the handset through the slot in the heavy metal door to my cell. The phone itself was far beyond my reach. Bastards!

Besides taking my phone calls, Bonnie was also very supportive in person. Three times a week after work, she’d make the long drive to the prison and wait in line for a very long time for her turn to see me in the visiting room, with guards watching us the whole time. We were allowed a brief hug and quick kiss. Over and over, I would earnestly reassure her that this was the last time I would ever do anything like this. As in the past, I really believed it.

I continued to sit in solitary while attorney Alan Rubin negotiated with the prosecutor about the terms of a plea bargain that would let...

Digital’s actual losses were related to the investigation of the incident; the $4 million figure was an arbitrary number chosen for the purpose of sentencing me to a lengthy prison term under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. My punishment should really have been based on the cost of the licensing fees I hadn’t paid for the source code I’d copied, which would have been much, much less.

Still, I wanted to settle the case and get out of my coffinlike cell as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to stand trial because I knew the Feds had easily enough evidence to convict me: they had my notes and disks, they had Lenny’s eagerness to testify against me, they had the tape from a body wire Lenny had worn during our last hacking session.

At last my attorney worked out a deal with the Federal prosecutors that would result in my serving a one-year prison term. They also wanted me to testify against Lenny. That came as a shock, since I’d always heard that the guy who squealed fi...

But when we got into court, Judge Pfaelzer apparently was influenced by the many rumors and false allegations that had piled up against me over time. She rejected the plea agreement, deeming it too lenient. Still, she allowed a revised version that gave me one year in jail, followed by six months in a halfway house. I was also required to sit down with DEC’s Andy Goldstein to tell him how we’d hacked into DEC and copied its most coveted source code.

As soon as I said I would accept a plea agreement, I magically lost my “national security threat” status. I was transferred from solitary into the general population. At first it felt almost as good as being released, but then reality quickly reminded me that I was still in jail.

While I was in the general population at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a fellow prisoner, a Colombian drug lord, offered to pay me $5 million cash if I could hack into Sentry, the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ computer system, and get him released. I played along to keep on friendly...

Soon I was transferred to the Federal prison camp at Lompoc. What a difference: there was dormitory housing instead of cells, and not even a fence around the place. I was sharing my new digs with the who’s who of white-collar crime. My fellow inmates even i...

Once when I was sitting on a wooden bench, waiting in line to use the phone, Ivan Boesky sat down next to me with a coffee in hand. Everybody knew who he was: a onetime billionaire financial genius who had been convicted of insider trading. And it turned out he knew who I was, too: “Hey, Mitnick,” he said, “how much money did you make hacking those computers?” “I didn’t do it for the money; I did it for the entertainment,” I replied.

My imminent move to a halfway house was the good news. The bad news was that a Probation Officer had called Bonnie to make an appointment to “inspect” the apartment she was then living in, explaining that he had to approve my future living arrangements before I was released. For Bonnie, that was the last straw. She felt she had been through enough and couldn’t dance this dance anymore. “You don’t need to inspect my apartment,” she told the guy. “My husband won’t be living here.” On her next visit, she gave me the bad news: she was filing for divorce.

She now says, “It was a very painful time for me. I thought I had failed. It was scary. I was too afraid to leave Kevin, but too afraid to stay. The fear of staying just became too big.” I was stunned. We had been planning to spend the rest of our lives together, and now she had changed her mind just as I was nearing release. I felt as if a ton of bricks had been dropped on me. I was really hurt, and totally shocked.

was deeply disappointed about her decision to end our marriage. What could account for her sudden change of heart? There must be another guy, I thought—somebody else was in the picture. I figured that by checking out the messages on her answering machine, I could find out who it was. I felt bad about doing it, but I needed to know the truth.

knew Bonnie’s answering machine was a RadioShack product because I recognized the jingle it played to prompt the caller to leave a message. I also knew that with this particular machine, you could retrieve messages remotely, but only if you had the handheld device that came with it, which emitted a special set of tones to turn on the playback. How could I get around that and listen to her messages without the remote beeper?

I called a RadioShack store and described the type of answering machine she had, then added that I had lost my beeper and needed to buy another. The salesman said there were four possible beepers for the various models of that particular answering machine—...

“I’m a musician, so I’ve got a good ear.” He wanted me to come down to the store, but I couldn’t leave the halfway house because new arrivals weren’t permitted to leave the premises for the first thirty days they were there. I pleaded with him to open one of each type, put...

My persistence paid off: the guy went to the trouble of setting up the four remotes and playing each of their tones for me. I had a microcassette-tape recorder running the...

Afterward, I called Bonnie’s phone and played back the tones through the receiver. The third one did the trick. I heard Bonnie leave a message on her own phone, presumably from work. After the call had gone to the machine, some guy in her apartment picked up, and the tape recorded both sides of thei...

Eavesdropping on her messages was a stupid thing for me to do because it just made the pain I was already feeling that much worse. But it confirmed my suspicions. I was pretty upset that she had been lying to me. I was desperate enough to actually consider sneaking out of the halfway house to...

After that first month, I was allowed to leave the halfway house for some selected appointments and visits. I often went to see Bonnie, trying to win her back. On one of those visits, I noticed that she’d carelessly left her latest phone bill sitting on the table. It showed that she’d been spending hours on the phone ...

Well, of course, I had to find out for sure. I casually asked if she ever heard from any of my buddies, like Lewis. She lied, flatly denying having ever been in touch with him at all—and confirming my worst fear. In my mind, she had completely blindsided me. Where were the faith and trust that I thought I had finally found in her? I confronted her but got nowhere. I ...