Free The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

body shot.
Some kind of joke.
    What the fu —
    "Hey, we want to talk to you!"
    Four suits. They don't want to talk about root beer.
    Mitnick walks toward them, and then tosses the papers up in the
air.
    The chase is on. Two of the suits clutch at the papers, and Mitnick
doubles his odds. He's in the parking lot, running toward Ralph's
supermarket, dashing toward the crowded holiday sidewalks. He
churns his strong legs and pumps his arms. Within a minute, the
footsteps fade. One DMV pursuer is overweight, the other is out of
shape.
    Down the sidewalk, across Ventura Boulevard into a residential
neighborhood. He clambers over a wall and hits the ground running.
Kevin Mitnick is in top physical condition. They don't have a
chance.
    Two miles from Kinkos, the hacker slows to a jog.
    He peels off his sport shirt and congratulates himself on having
worn shorts under his pants. He turns his shirt inside out, tears the
pants off, and stashes them in a front yard. Then, he finds the nearest
pay phone, and calls a cab and his friend Lewis De Payne.
    Kevin Mitnick is on the run.
    II.

The Garbage Han
    It's early 1992.
Ron Austin is cruising down
the Sunset Strip past the Rainbow Bar and Grill, when he sees Eric
Heinz huddled in the doorway of the club next door, dodging the
rain. It's nearly 3 a.m., as Austin pulls over and rolls down his win-
dow to say hello.
    The last time Austin saw him was a few months ago at a Taco
Bell. Eric wanted him to bring his laptop and meet him there, and
Austin did just that. But then, suddenly, Eric had to go to the bath-
room. Everything skidded into slow motion. The undercover cars
converged on the outdoor patio. Big Agent Stan Ornellas slammed
Austin's face against the wall, shouted, and in one quick move
pressed a gun against his temple.
    Austin was blindsided. He had considered Eric a friend. When
they first met in 1989, Austin was studying economics at UCLA,
trying to go straight after being busted for hacking in 1983 with
Kevin Poulsen. But neither Austin nor Poulsen had found it easy to
quit. Poulsen took a job in Northern California for a defense con-
tractor and seemed on the verge of a legitimate career in computers.
But Austin knew that was only half of his life. Nights Poulsen would
phone Austin from yet another Pacific Bell central office he had
sneaked into, his voice barely audible over the clatter of old electro—
    mechanical telephone switching equipment. Soon Poulsen was play-
ing Austin wiretaps and describing how they could win radio prizes.
Then the inevitable happened. The police stumbled onto a storage
locker Poulsen kept crammed with hacking and burglary tools. The
FBI secretly readied a federal indictment, and Poulsen, fearing the
worst, ducked underground.
    In 1989, Eric put an ad in a Los Angeles paper looking for some-
one with special knowledge of the phone company. Poulsen and
Austin responded, and they became an unlikely trio: Poulsen, then a
famous federal fugitive profiled on Unsolved Mysteries; Eric, the
rocker; and Austin, the economist. Poulsen wanted Eric around to
join him on his nightly forays into the central offices of Los Angeles,
looking for new secrets to the phone system. But he didn't trust Eric
and guarded his knowledge carefully. It was Austin who found Eric's
Hollywood style and fearlessness intriguing. He taught Eric the se-
cret of SAS, the Pac Bell system that could manipulate phone lines to
win radio contests or wiretap. Austin even shared a $10,000 radio
prize with Eric, so the rocker could buy his girlfriend breast im-
plants. He helped Eric secretly move when the FBI found out where
he was living. And once, when Eric was traipsing through a Pac Bell
central office, Austin called him on the PA system to warn him the
cops were about to surround the building.
    After the FBI roughed him up at Taco Bell, Austin spent a long
weekend in solitary confinement and then pled guilty to wiretapping,
fraudulently winning a $50,000 Porsche, and rigging a host