A flurry of urgent investigation ensued. FBI agents were dispatched to meet with Southern Bell telephone security in Miami and interview Engressia, B. David, and Tandy Way. It was a tempest in a teapot, said Miami telephone company investigators. Yes, they obviously knew of Engressia and had been following his and Tandy Way’s activities for the past year or so, but basically they were considered to be harmless pests. Their investigation had not revealed that the two had intercepted any telephone calls or wiretapped any lines, civilian or military, and that “the activities of Engressia and Way have been strictly for their own amusement and harassment of the telephone company.” For their parts, Engressia, Way, and David all told the FBI, in essence, that yes, they were fascinated with telephones but, no, they hadn’t done anything wrong, and they certainly hadn’t intercepted any calls and didn’t know nuthin’ ’bout no top secret White House telephone system. FBI headquarters called a halt to the investigation, but not before sending off posterior-covering letters to the White House, the secretary of defense, and the head of the Secret Service to let them know that their communications systems were alleged to be vulnerable. A few days later an attorney at the Justice Department blessed the FBI’s stand-down: there was “not a sufficient indication of a violation under the Interception of Communications Statute to justify investigation,” he said.
Engressia and company had gotten lucky; cooler heads had prevailed and decided this was all much ado about nothing. B. David, however, was not one to leave well enough alone. After his visit from the FBI, he concluded that the telephone company must have been illegally monitoring his conversations with Joe Engressia. In fact, he believed that the FBI agents had confirmed this during their interview with him. He proceeded to write an audacious two-page letter to the Kansas City FBI office citing chapter and verse of the Communications Act of 1934 and demanding that the Bureau turn the tables and investigate the telephone company for illegal wiretapping. It is unclear if the FBI ever gave David the courtesy of a response, but an internal FBI memo stated that B. David “is believed to be totally unreliable and his allegations are unfounded.”
Despite his upbeat quotes to the press after his whistling incident was resolved, Engressia remembers his years at USF as far from happy. Partly this was a lack of focus. “I wasn’t really sure why I was in college,” he says. Engressia drifted from one major to another—business administration, mathematics, electrical engineering. “I didn’t really know why I had come, except that was just the next step that you do. I hadn’t really thought it through at the time, what I wanted.”
The bigger part of his unhappiness was simply this: he was lonely. Thanks to the publicity surrounding his whistling escapades he had started getting calls from other phone phreaks in addition to B. David. “That was the first glimpse that there were even other people in the world interested in phones,” he says. But now, even though he finally knew there were others like him out there, he couldn’t talk to them—at least not on any regular basis. “In college I didn’t have a phone where I could dial out direct,” he remembers; students in the dorms weren’t allowed to have their own telephone lines. For most this would be a minor inconvenience, but for Engressia it cut him off from the one thing that had provided him with years of comfort—and the thing that now promised to connect him to other people like him. His phone phreak fixes had to come from quick calls on the dorm pay phone, occasional trips home on weekends, and summer vacation.
“I did get on the phone some in college but I didn’t have much money to speak of, $40 a month I think it was, of spending money where they gave me a state scholarship for the blind. It would be $6 to town for cab fare, so I didn’t get out much,” he recalls. “I might have stayed in college if I could have had the contacts, you know, on the phone and everything,” he says. But as it was, he says, “I was so lonesome and depressed there, in college. It was just one of my sad times.”
Engressia quit school and left USF about a year short of his degree, moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in March 1971. “When I left for Memphis, that was when my life started,” he says.
He was determined to have his own apartment, one with his own phone, where he’d be able talk to other phone phreaks as much as he wanted. Too, he was tired of living off of his state aid-to-the-blind check. He wanted to be independent, to have a job, to be part of society—to “be a man,” as he put it.
The apartment was easy. The job was harder. He applied at dozens of places, “as a switchboard operator, or just about anything, really.” He heard one word a whole lot: no. The word wasn’t always one syllable with two letters, n-o. “It came in a lot of forms,” he said, but it always spelled the same thing in the end. We don’t think it would be safe for you to work at our company, you might bump into a ladder and hurt yourself. We don’t see how you could possibly be a switchboard operator—how would you dial?
The weeks slipped by. The Nos wore on him. “I got desperate,” he said, “$97-per-month welfare wasn’t providing me a decent standard of living . . . I had heard that when you live on welfare you live on beans and baloney. Well, I went down to the grocery store and, you know, beans and baloney aren’t so cheap anymore!”
Desperation is the mother of invention. Engressia invented a plan that can only be described as crazy: “I decided that since I had come so close to getting a job down in Florida by getting arrested—which was a mistake on my part, to have gotten caught, at that time—I decided to actually plan to get caught.” He would engineer his own bust by the telephone company and use the resulting publicity to get a job. “I called it my great gamble. I knew it would either pay off or I’d fail.”
Engressia set upon his task with urgency. “This was in late April and I only had money to last me until the end of July,” he said. “I was running out of money and I needed to do something.” Worse, much of his great gamble was out of his control. What if the phone company didn’t do anything or took too long to do it? “I didn’t want them to wait too long, either.”
He called the telephone company and reported troubles with his line. He knew this would prompt somebody at the telephone company’s test board to connect to his line to test it for problems. When he heard what he described as the “subtle impedance change” indicating that a test man was on the line, he began narrating a series of telephonic tricks for the benefit of his invisible audience. “I just said, ‘Oh, I’m going to call Russia now.’” Calling through a satellite circuit, “I whistled up the U.S. embassy in Moscow and talked for about two hours pretending I was a talk show host and [the embassy operator] was a talk show [guest]. They heard that and then I made a couple of other free calls and gave my phone number and then used the blue box after it,” he said. “Then,” he said, “I called this place called NORAD headquarters, something to do with the military, and I called it on a priority circuit. For some reason it rubbed them the wrong way.”
After the first evening Engressia felt sure that the phone company would soon wiretap his line. He hinted cryptically at his plan to get a job by getting arrested as he talked to his eavesdroppers: “I have only to July, so I must fly. Don’t sit home and sob, blue box and get a job.” He performed more stunts to impress the telephone company. “I remember one time they were playing around with my line and they cut the current off and the phone wouldn’t work. So I hooked up a 30-watt amplifier and a microphone,” he recalled. This he used to transmit his voice into the malfunctioning telephone line, betting that technicians in the telephone company central office or test board would be listening. “I wonder if a blind person himself could really hook up an amplifier in the dark all by himself?” he said into the phone line.
Engressia figured that, thanks to his attention-getting tricks, the phone company was probably now wiretapping his line on a continual basis. But he couldn’t know for sure. And so, he said, “I hooked up a circuit so I could monitor the line while it was still on the hook.” With this circuitry in place h
e could leave his phone hung up and yet still hear what the telephone company was up to as his line was being worked on. He quickly determined that the phone company was indeed monitoring him. Best of all, the phone company’s monitoring circuit inadvertently worked both ways. “Their voice was leaking through the monitor that they had. I could hear them talking! They said, ‘Did you hear what they said? He said something about hooking up a microphone!’
“In a sense I was tapping the tappers,” Engressia gleefully recalled. “That made me feel good because I knew my plan was under way,” he said. “I’m counting the days to my first paycheck.”
The telephone company later admitted that it began investigating Engressia when he’d first reported troubles with his telephone line. A few weeks later they sent an undercover security agent posing as a magazine reporter to interview Engressia at his apartment in Memphis. The agent was “freely shown how the whistle calls were placed and the equipment in the young man’s possession.”
On June 2, 1971, as he was waiting on the sidewalk for a cab, a deep voice of someone nearby asked him if he was Joe Engressia. He said that he was. The voice replied, “You’re under arrest.”
He spent the night in jail. “I was gonna call some newspapers but two of them came to the jail, and then a TV network came to interview me the next day.” His publicity plan seemed to be working but, even so, the experience of going to jail was unnerving. Everything might go perfectly or he just might end up stuck in jail. “You talk about a combination of emotions,” he said. “I was happy, sad, excited, scared, nervous, everything imaginable lumped into one.”
When the police searched Engressia’s place that evening they found “complex telephone equipment devised by Engressia in his tiny apartment. It included pushbutton gadgets that could be programmed to transfer calls to neighbors’ telephones.”
Arraigned before Judge Ray Churchill of the Memphis City Court, Engressia was charged with two counts of fraud for making free calls. Despite entering an innocent plea to the charges, he told the court, “I’ve done wrong and the telephone company has every right to prosecute me.” He added that he was “just fascinated with phones.” Judge Churchill released him on $1 bail and ordered the trial continued until the next week.
“Some folks are on dope, I was on telephones,” Engressia told reporters after his arrest. “I knew it would get me into trouble, but when I got lonely I would reach for the phone and it would be there.”
Judge Churchill called Engressia’s trial to order on June 8. Things did not go swimmingly for the prosecution. A telephone company security agent in court played a tape of some of Engressia’s phone calls for the judge, Engressia recalls. During one of the calls an operator asked Engressia for his telephone number. “The operator would say ‘number please’ and I said 526-6156,” Engressia remembers. Judge Churchill asked whose number that was. The telephone company security agents responded that, in fact, 526-6156 was Engressia’s telephone number.
Judge Churchill exploded, Engressia says: “He gave his own number and you know who he called and you know how long he talked. Why didn’t you just bill him for the call?”
The security agents responded that Engressia was a threat to national security. He calls through a satellite sometimes, they said.
Who owns that satellite? Judge Churchill asked.
The security agents admitted that they weren’t sure of the exact ownership of the satellite.
Engressia recalls Judge Churchill’s response: “You don’t even own the satellite! I don’t know, I oughta just throw this whole thing out. You know, if I had known what this is about, I wouldn’t have signed the warrant.”
The judge was “more sympathetic to my side than even I was,” Engressia says.
Judge Churchill ultimately decided that there was not enough evidence to convene a grand jury. He reduced the charges to two counts of malicious mischief. “I can understand how he was driving them crazy,” the judge allowed. In addition to a $10 fine, Judge Churchill sentenced Engressia to sixty days in jail.
“He paused awhile,” Engressia recalls, and then the judge said, “Sentence suspended.”
“Boy, it felt good to go out in the sun that day!” Engressia says. “That was enough to persuade me that stuff was over.” From that point forward, Engressia decided, there would be no more illegal phone calls. In the future, he says, when there was a knock on his door he wanted to know that it would always be a friendly knock.
As for Engressia’s great gamble, his plan to “blue box and get a job”?
“I got four job offers the next week,” Engressia said. The mining and manufacturing company 3M flew him up to Minnesota for an interview and offered him a job in a research laboratory but he declined; it didn’t have anything to do with telephones and he didn’t want to spend his time “figuring out the right grain pattern for sandpaper,” he says. In the end he accepted a two-dollar-an-hour job at a small but nearby independent telephone company called Millington Telephone. “I guess they’ll have me do whatever I can that they need done; maybe I can work on the test board,” he said.
“I don’t recommend that method of getting a job,” Engressia said several years later, “but it worked for me.”
Ten
Bill Acker Learns to Play the Flute
IT WAS A conspiracy, obviously. A conspiracy organized by God himself, one made up of little blind kids out to drive the phone company crazy. What else could explain the fact that Bill Acker and Joe Engressia shared a birthday? What else could explain the fact that, like Engressia, Acker was born blind?
As with Engressia and his sister, the doctors didn’t know what caused it. Acker’s father, who had long suffered from seizures, killed himself in 1955 when Bill was two, leaving Bill’s mother to raise him and his brother. Though his aunt Kaye and their extended Irish Catholic family were a big help to the three of them, Acker says, they were mostly on their own. Acker is quick to acknowledge that things were tough for his mom—“No kidding, she had it hard,” he says—but he recalls his childhood as being “all about her moods, her emotions.”
The public schools in Farmingdale, New York, weren’t wholly prepared to handle a blind kid. “The one teacher didn’t know what to do with me and let an itinerant teacher do it all. I sat in class and didn’t really get any attention, except from the itinerant teacher,” he says. “Even though I do remember that I was being ignored, I was fine with it. From my point of view, school was fine. I could daydream and do what I do. It didn’t hurt my feelings that I wasn’t getting an education.” Unfortunately, says Acker, “I wasn’t catching on to Braille,” something thought to be very important for the blind in those days. So when Bill was not yet seven his mom sent him off to the Lavelle School for the Blind in the Bronx. Run by Dominican nuns, Lavelle was partly a residential school—along with several hundred other blind kids, Bill would stay there during the week and come home on weekends.
Educationally it may have been an improvement from being ignored, but it was far from paradise. “I was able to absorb enough stuff, but I was not motivated,” Acker says. The nuns “branded me lazy over the whole Braille thing. That just sort of tuned me out. ‘Okay, fine, if you think I’m lazy, what the hey . . .’” Some people might work hard to disprove an accusation of laziness but, Acker says, “unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.” So he “skimped by on my education. That wasn’t where it was at for me.”
Where it was at for Acker was technology. He had been fascinated with technology for as long as he can remember. As a kid, “going outside was almost like a punishment,” he says. “There was nothing for me outside. There was no technology outside.”
Ah, but inside! Inside there was AM radio, shortwave radio, television. Acker spent much of his childhood learning about radios, how they work and how to make them work better. “DXing”—hunting down radio signals from places as distant as
possible—was the equivalent of collecting baseball cards for young Bill Acker. DXing required patience, perseverance, and a solid understanding of how radio worked. Acker had these qualities in spades. Before he became a teenager, Acker needed almost no sleep and didn’t like staying in bed. “There was an unspoken understanding: so long as I didn’t disturb anybody I could stay up late—or wake up really early, like 3:30 a.m.—and do whatever I wanted,” he says. So on many occasions Acker tuned old radios and searched for faint transmissions from faraway places in the wee hours of the morning.
In 1963, when Acker was ten, his mother thought her son needed to get out more. She pushed for him to attend Camp Wapanacki, a summer camp for blind kids in Vermont. Acker reluctantly agreed to go, he says, but only because he saw it as an opportunity to bring his radio and hear new DX signals from places he hadn’t been able to receive in Farmingdale.
Inside had another piece of technology besides radio and TV: the telephone. “I remember being five or six years old and picking up the phone,” Acker says. “If you picked up the phone and waited for the dial tone to go away, you got a high tone,” a loud, incessant tone that indicated you had left your phone off hook and that reminded you to hang it up—designed to get your attention, in other words. The tone succeeded in getting Acker’s attention. It intrigued him. What was it? How did it work?
In hindsight, this was probably not the kind of attention the telephone company wanted.
When he was fourteen, Acker decided it would be cool to find out where all the area codes were. He’s not sure today exactly why he thought this would be cool, but teenagers are like that—it seemed like a good idea at the time. Acker remembered the telephone company commercial where a little jingle encouraged you to call 555-1212, the so-called universal information number, a free call in every area code. For Acker, free was good; his mother wasn’t about to pay for him to make long-distance calls to every area code.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 15