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

chain-chugging Coors Lights as soon as he rolled out of bed, and by the end of the day he’d be useless, but in that sweet spot between the morning’s sobriety and the blurriness of midafternoon, Norminton was a master of the high-stakes con—a criminal rainmaker who could produce seven-figure sums from thin air.
    Norminton’s latest caper had required little more than a telephone and a fax machine. The target had been the Entrust Group, a Pennsylvania investment brokerage house. On a summer day in 1997, Norminton picked up the phone and called a vice president at Entrust, adopting the persona of an investment manager at Highland Federal Bank, a real bank in Santa Monica, California.
    Oozing confidence and charm, the swindler persuaded Entrust to buy into the bank’s high-yield certificates of deposit, promising the VP a healthy 6.20 percent return on a one-year investment. When Entrust eagerly wired $297,000 to Highland, the cash wound up in the account of a dummy corporation Norminton’s accomplice had set up under Entrust’s name. To the bank, the transaction looked like an investment house moving money from one branch to another.
    The grifters promptly withdrew all but $10,000 of the cash and then ran the scam again, this time with Norminton’s partner making the phone call to the same VP and pretending to be from a different bank, City National, offering an even higher return. Entrust promptly sent two more transfers totaling $800,000.
    Norminton was undone by his ambition. He sent his accomplice into City National to pull out $700,000 in a single cashier’s check. An investigator at the bank got suspicious and backtracked the incoming wire transfers to the real Entrust. At the next withdrawal, FBI agents were waiting. The financial mastermind was now cooling his heels in Taft. The only silver lining to his incarceration was that he’d met a talented hacker looking to get back at the system.
    Norminton made it clear that he saw real potential in Max, and the pair took to walking the yard every day, swapping war stories and fantasizing about how they might work together when they hit the streets. With Norminton’s guidance, Max could easily learn to crack brokerage houses, where they’d tap into overstuffed trading accounts and drain them into offshore banks. One big haul and they’d have enough cash for the rest of their lives.
    After five months, Norminton and his schemes were sent home to sunny Orange County, California, while Max remained at Taft with another year left on his sentence—long, tedious days of bad food, standing for count, and the sound of chains and keys.
    In August 2002, Max was granted early release to a sixty-one-bed halfway house in Oakland, where he shared a room with five other ex-cons.Kimi met with Max to present him with divorce papers. She was getting serious with the guy she’d met at Burning Man; it was time, she said, for Max to let her go.Max refused to sign.
    Max’s relative freedom at the halfway house was tenuous—the facility demanded that he obtain gainful employment or go back to prison, and telecommuting wasn’t allowed. He reached out to his old contacts in Silicon Valley and found his employability had been shattered by his high-profile hacking conviction and over a year in prison.
    Desperate, he borrowed a laptop from one of the Hungry Programmers and banged out a message to an employment list watched by the computer security experts who had once admired him. “I have been showing up at places that farm out manual labor, 5:30 am, and still haven’t found any work,” he wrote. “My situation is just ridiculous.” He offered his services at fire-sale prices. “I am willing to work for minimum wage for the next few months. Surely there is some open position at a security company in the area.… The last half dozen employers I have had paid me at least $100/hr for my time, now I am only asking for $6.75.”
    A consultant answered the plea, agreeing to let Max