Free Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground by Kevin Poulsen Page A

“There’s a need for those who would follow your footsteps to know that this can result in incarceration,” the judge said.
    The sentence: eighteen months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release in which Max wouldn’t be allowed on the Internet without the permission of his probation officer.
    The prosecutor asked the judge to order Max immediately taken into custody, but Ware denied the request and gave the hacker a month to put his affairs in order and turn himself in to the U.S. marshals.
    •  •  •
     
    Max and Kimi had moved to Vancouver, near her family, after his guilty plea. When they returned home, Max wasted no time arranging for Whitehats.com and arachNIDS to survive his incarceration. He set up automatic bill payments for his bandwidth and wrote out a list of items for Kimi to take care of in his absence. She was in charge of arachNIDS now, he said, indicating the server squatting on the floor of their apartment.
    The couple adopted two kittens to keep Kimi company while he was gone, named for the swords from
Elric of Melniboné
. The orange boy-cat was Mournblade; the gray female was Stormbringer.
    Max spent his last weekend of freedom in front of his keyboard, getting arachNIDS ready for Kimi’s stewardship. When Monday came he turned himself in on schedule. On June 25, 2001, he was locked in the county jail pending his shipment to his new home, Taft Federal Prison, a corporate-run facility owned by Wackenhut, positioned near a small town in central California.
    As far as Max was concerned, it was another injustice, just like back in Idaho. He’d been sent back to prison not for his hacking but for refusing to set up Matt Harrigan. He was being punished for his loyalty, once again a victim of a capricious justice system. He doubted Judge Ware had even looked at the details of his case.
    Kimi was adrift, alone for the first time since she’d met Max. For all his talk about staying with her forever, he’d chosen a course of action that guaranteed their separation.
    Two months later,Kimi was talking to him on the phone from prison when she heard a
pop!
and the smell of acrid smoke filled her nostrils. The motherboard on Max’s server had burst into flames. Max tried to calm her—all she had to do was replace the motherboard. He could do it in his sleep. Max talked her through the process, but Kimi was realizing she wasn’t cut out for life as the prison wife of a hacker.
    In August, she went to the Burning Man festival in Nevada to forget her troubles. When she got home, she broke some bad news to Max over the phone. She’d met someone else.
    It was another betrayal.Max took the news with eerie calm, interrogating her about every detail: What drugs was she on when she cheated on him? What sexual positions did they use? He wanted to hear her ask for his forgiveness—he’d have given it to her in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t what she was asking for. She wanted a divorce. “I don’t know if you even think about the future anymore,” she said.
    In search of closure, Kimi caught a flight to California and drove to Taft, where she sat nervously in the waiting room, her eyes playing over a wall of posters depicting Wackenhut’s network of hivelike prisons around the country. When Max was brought in, he took his place across the stainless steel picnic table in the visiting room and launched into an appeal. He did think of the future, he told her, and he’d been making plans in the joint.
    “I’ve been talking to some people,” he said, lowering his voice to a hush. “People I think I could work with.”
    Jeffrey James Norminton was at the tail end of a twenty-seven-month stretch when Max met him in Taft. At thirty-four, Norminton had the stolid physical presence of a brawler, thick necked with an oversized forehead and a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin. An alcoholic and an accomplished con man, he was a financial wizard who did his best work half-sober. He’d start