The tape recordings and transcripts of Sheridan’s interrogations piled up over the weeks, first a handful, later more than a dozen. Sheridan wanted to please. He went through his notes and address book, combing them for information and then distilling it all down. It got to the point that the sessions were closer to dictation than interrogation—no questions being asked by Perrin, just Sheridan reading into the microphone from preprepared notes. Names and addresses of phone phreaks. Their specific phreaking activities. Recommendations for who should be investigated—“worked,” in security parlance—due to their “fucking around.” Recommendations for who the phone company should go easy on too. It was all there, all on tape.
The address book Sheridan gave up contained more than sixty names and telephone numbers of phone phreaks. Over hours of interviews he provided additional details on more than fifty of them. Then there were the specific cases that Wayne Perrin and Pacific Telephone needed tied up. Remember the telephone crime wave that had hit the Valley, the burgled phone company trucks, the $21,000 conference call? All of those needed to be explained. The conference call was “Project 21,” Sheridan said, a prank against a certain Doctor Bosley who Sheridan and his buddies were pissed at for some reason. They arranged to use some telephone lines that belonged to Bosley over the course of a weekend to call all of their phone phreak friends around the world. It was nice to talk to their far-flung network for nineteen hours but the real purpose was to screw Doc Bosley. Hence Project 21: a goal of racking up $21,000 in phone bills for the good doctor.
Then there were the telephone company employees. If you’re a phone phreak, where do you get your information? Dumpster diving, playing with the phone, talking to other phone phreaks? Sure, all that works. But sometimes it’s easier just to talk to people who actually work for the telephone company. Big surprise: some telco employees were phone phreaks too. Others just had a soft spot for a bright kid who wanted to know how the telephone system worked.
Sheridan turned in five Pacific Telephone employees and one General Telephone employee, all in the Los Angeles area. Some of these employees were phone phreaks and had black boxes of their own. Some Sheridan claimed would use Pacific Telephone computer systems to turn on or off various features for him on his telephone line. Others provided technical information to him or other phreaks. An employee even gave him telephone company equipment. In at least one case Sheridan actually called a phone technician from Perrin’s conference room and got him to divulge confidential company information over the telephone while Perrin was listening from the sidelines.
In the end, two Pacific Telephone employees were fired and two were suspended; the General Telephone employee’s name was passed on to GTE security.
FBI headquarters wanted this case solved. Pacific Telephone had blue box detectors and tape recorders and dialed-number recorders and every other god damn thing on every telephone that Draper came anywhere near. FBI agents had Draper under surveillance morning, noon, and night. Draper doesn’t have the best judgment to begin with. And just in case Draper’s bad judgment can’t be relied upon, an informant was being sent up from Los Angeles to move things along.
To this day, Draper maintains that he was framed. He says Sheridan came up from LA and attended a potluck dinner with him at the PCC. Sometime during the evening, Draper claims, Sheridan went outside to the pay phone next to the little market down the street from the PCC and made a blue box call. “I go out to the store and there he is, inside the pay phone booth,” Draper says, “but I didn’t see the blue box.” Draper remembers Sheridan calling him over to the pay phone—“Jim wants to talk to you, here, say hi to Jim”—and passing him the phone. “He hands the phone to me,” Draper says. “I say, ‘Hi Jim, what’s going on?’”
“Well, it turns out he had arranged with the FBI to tap that phone,” Draper says. “He told the FBI that I was going to be making a blue box call at that phone at that date and time.” The result was that the FBI now had a blue box call on tape with Draper’s voice on it.
Given the pressure the FBI agents were under, given the teletype message in which the San Francisco FBI wanted an informant to come up from Los Angeles and “accomplish the following objectives”—the objectives that the assistant U.S. attorney didn’t sign off on, whatever they were—this all seems vaguely plausible. A stretch, perhaps, but plausible. But the dates don’t line up.
You see, the informant that the Los Angeles office of the FBI sent up didn’t arrive in the Bay Area until Tuesday, February 24. The blue box telephone calls that Draper was eventually busted for occurred four days earlier, on Friday, February 20. And on that Friday the Los Angeles informant was still in Los Angeles, enjoying sunny southern California weather or breathing smog or whatever it is that LA phone phreak informants do when they’re off duty.
According to Draper’s FBI file, an FBI special agent had Draper under surveillance on the Friday that the blue box phone calls were made.
On February 20, 1976 at 5:23 PM, John Draper was observed in a public phone booth adjacent to the Menalto Market [. . .]. He was hunched over in the booth with his face close to the door, as if he were peering out. He was alone in the booth and no one appeared to be waiting in the vicinity for the booth.
Of course, simply being in a pay phone booth isn’t a crime, even if you’re John Draper, even if you’re hunched over and peering out. But the phone company’s monitoring setup finally paid off. It took security agents a few days to review the tapes (it was over a weekend, after all) but on Monday Pacific Telephone presented the FBI with a letter.
This will serve to inform you that The Pacific Telephone Company has reason to believe that instances of toll fraud are being committed within your jurisdiction (San Mateo County) in violation of Title 18, Section 1343 of the Federal Criminal Code.
We will be pleased to apprise you of certain evidence in our possession which you may acquire pursuant to a duly issued subpoena or letter of demand in accordance with applicable Federal Law.
The phone company had learned much from the Hanna and Bubis cases of ten years earlier. If you have tape recordings of somebody making illegal calls, you don’t just hand them over to the FBI. No, you make the FBI demand them from you via a subpoena. That way nobody can make a stink later about how you violated the wiretap laws.
Upon receiving his letter of demand from the FBI, George Alex, the Pacific Telephone security agent for the San Jose region, met with FBI agents the very next day. He provided them with a tape recording and detailed analysis of blue box calls made from the Menalto pay phone on February 20, starting at 4:45 p.m. and continuing until 5:50 p.m., in other words, during the period when the FBI special agent had eyeballed Draper in the pay phone booth, alone and hunched over and peering out. Dozens of blue box calls were made from that line during that time.
Many of these calls were to various internal telephone company test numbers. Some were to numbers in the Bay Area where no one answered. But two calls were enough to hang Draper: one to some friends of his in Pennsylvania and one to his answering service in Mountain View.
For younger readers who have never heard of such a thing as an answering service, come with me on a quick trip down memory lane. Back in the day, long before voice mail, even before telephone answering machines, busy or self-important people would hire an answering service, a company that employed real, live human beings to answer your telephone calls and take messages, handwritten on little pink slips of paper. You could then call in to the answering service, speak to one of these real, live human beings, and retrieve your messages.
The reason the calls to his answering service and his friends were such nails in Draper’s telephonic coffin was that they proved it was Draper who had made the calls. In both cases he identified himself as “John.” The FBI even went so far as to subpoena the little pink slips of paper and to confirm that it was indeed John Draper who had the account with the ans
wering service, and the service’s receptionist said she recognized Draper’s voice on the tapes the FBI played for her. FBI agents got Draper’s friend in Pennsylvania to listen to the tapes as well; he, too, confirmed that it was Draper’s voice.
With all that, why would Draper still maintain to this very day that Sheridan made a blue box call and then handed him the phone in an effort to set him up when the facts seem so clearly to indicate otherwise? Is Draper simply delusional?
Possibly. But it is also possible that Draper’s version of events happened too. It is clear from FBI files that, despite knowing about the blue box calls Draper made on February 20, the FBI went through with its plan to send an informant up from Los Angeles. The FBI learned of Draper’s February 20 calls only on Monday, February 23, the day before the informant was scheduled to arrive from LA. Agents may not have known that they had enough to convict Draper at that point; if so, sending the informant up from LA might still have made sense to them. This informant may well have been Sheridan. And Sheridan’s instructions may indeed have included getting Draper’s voice on a blue-boxed phone call.
So Draper may not be delusional. He may actually have been set up. But, if so, the setup wasn’t what got him. He got himself, via his own blue box phone calls from three days earlier.
Draper’s arrest occurred about a month later, at 7:33 a.m. on April 2. It remains, to this day, a textbook example of how not to deal with the FBI when being arrested. The FBI’s after-action report says it best.
John Thomas Draper, 1905 Montecito, Apartment 6, was advised of the identities of the arresting Agents, as well as the fact that he was being arrested for a federal violation of Fraud by Wire. Draper was advised of his rights [. . .] which he waived as shown on an executed Warning and Waiver form.
Despite Draper’s having been arrested on Fraud by Wire charges four years earlier, the report continues,
Draper inquired as to what a Fraud by Wire violation was and it was explained to him that it involved the use of a “blue box.” Draper stated that he never used a “blue box” and why didn’t the Agents execute their search warrant and look for one. Draper was informed that there was no search warrant but that he could voluntarily consent to a search. He then agreed to allow his apartment and his Volkswagen Van to be searched.
Oh dear.
As Draper selected each article of clothing that he desired to wear, they were first searched [. . .] In the pocket of the pants [the agents] found a small, black, plastic box approximately one inch by two inches by three inches with an on/off switch and three buttons on top.
Oh dear, oh dear.
After Draper completed dressing, he was transported by Bureau car to the Santa Clara County Jail.
In addition to the mysterious black plastic box (which turned out to be a red box) the search turned up piles and piles of stuff that must have looked pretty damning to the FBI agents: bags of electronic parts, telephone company documents, computer printouts, teletype tapes, circuit boards, and reels of audiotapes. Oh, and a copy of a National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer manual, the operating manual to the federal criminal computer database.
It turns out that one of the best ways to get the FBI all riled up, second only to tapping its phones, is to have manuals to the Bureau’s computer systems casually lying around your apartment when FBI agents arrest you. The fact that the agents didn’t have a search warrant but that Draper invited them to search his apartment anyway just makes it all the more perfect. Or tragic. Possibly both.
Draper was booked at the county jail and released on $5,000 bail. A public defender was appointed. Twenty days later a federal grand jury indicted Draper on three counts of Fraud by Wire.
News of Draper’s bust raced through the phone phreak community; it was also picked up by the newswires and widely reported in the press. “Charges Filed Against Electronics Wizard,” read one headline; “Wizard Whistles Way into Trouble,” said another. For David Condon and his friends, it was a vindication of their policy of staying as far away from Captain Crunch as they could. Others closer to Draper felt a mix of exasperation and dread. “The first thing I thought was, what dumb or crazy stunt did Draper pull this time to get caught?” recalls Dr. Sidney Schaefer,‡‡‡ a phone phreak friend of Draper’s. “Then I began wondering who else might be next, since the bust meant they probably now had my name and number too.”
‡‡‡The pseudonym he went by at the time, a tip of the hat to the movie The President’s Analyst.
For his part, Draper was well and truly screwed. He was still on probation from his 1972 bust. One of the conditions of that probation was that “Draper shall refrain from illegal use of the telephone or other such electronic devices for fraudulent means,” which meant that even if he somehow managed to fight the charges the feds still might be able to get him on probation violations.
On April 22, 1976, Assistant U.S. Attorney Floy Dawson met with Draper’s attorney. Dawson proposed that the government would accept a guilty plea to one count of the charges and recommend six months’ jail time in return for Draper’s complete cooperation with the FBI. He went on to say that, should the government lose at an evidentiary hearing and if Draper didn’t cooperate, Dawson “would personally and vigorously pursue every possibility of having Draper’s current probation revoked and seeing to it that Draper will spend the remaining one and a half years of his probation in jail.” Out of options, Draper agreed, but with two provisos. First, that he be granted immunity for any related crimes he admitted to during FBI interviews. Second, that he not be made to name or incriminate friends.
Draper met four times with FBI personnel over the course of the summer. The interviews focused on understanding exactly what Draper did and how he did it, what the vulnerabilities were in the telephone system, and how to fix them. Draper was mostly cooperative but he couldn’t always keep himself from mocking the agents interviewing him. “It was a big joke for him,” recalled an FBI source familiar with the debriefings, a joke that inflated Draper’s ego to new dimensions.
On August 23, 1976, Draper was “sentenced to the custody of the Attorney General for three years to be imprisoned in a jail-type institution for four months, with the remainder of the sentence suspended and five years probation.” On October 4, 1976, Draper arrived at the Lompoc federal prison to serve his sentence. As he walked through the prison gate he added another first to the legend of Captain Crunch: the first phone phreak to serve time in a federal pen.
What of Paul Sheridan, the informant? And what of the phone phreaks he left behind?
On March 5, 1976, Sheridan signed a payment agreement with Pacific Telephone acknowledging that he owed the phone company some $10,851 ($10,000 for his part in Project 21, $457 for fraudulent credit card calls he’d made while in school, and $394 for his final telephone bill as Robert P. Norden). However, the agreement said, he had to pay only about $2,000 of this amount, and he could do it in easy monthly payments over the next six years. Unless, that is, he started phreaking again. If he made fraudulent calls, or wrote articles telling others how to phreak or encouraging them to do so, the entire amount would immediately be due and payable. The agreement required him to report his whereabouts to Pacific Telephone’s Pasadena security office every three months.
Wayne Perrin says, “In ninety percent of these cases, with the phone phreaks and the hackers, we had no criminal case. Everything we had was stuff that you could not prosecute them for. Either there was no legitimate crime on the books that you could go after them for or we had only their word that they did it. In other words, there was no tangible evidence that you could go into court and show you that Paul had access to autovon. He showed you how to do it, and he did it, but he did it at your direction. So you had no independent crime that you could go and prove. Now, he didn’t know that. And we never told him. So because he was smart, we kind of talked to some people, and we talked to
the air force recruiter, and so we got him kind of directed that way. He talked to the recruiter and they accepted him and he went in. Get him the hell out of here!” With that gentle nudge, about two weeks before FBI agents knocked on John Draper’s door, Paul Sheridan became Airman Sheridan, joining the United States Air Force and disappearing from the Los Angeles phone phreak scene.
After Draper’s arrest, Sheridan’s phone phreak colleagues were left to sort through the rubble and try to understand what, exactly, had happened. The sequence of events didn’t leave much to the imagination, at least as far as who was responsible. Everyone had been acting paranoid and hinky. Schaefer had tried to reach Sheridan multiple times in February and March but didn’t get any calls back. Then one day, Schaefer says, Sheridan called him to say that he had run into a little trouble with the phone company, but not to worry, as he had settled the problem. Sheridan said that phreaking had become boring to him and that he was going to disappear for a while. This struck Schaefer as odd, verging on unbelievable. Two weeks later Draper was in handcuffs. Captain Crunch was sure he had been framed and wasn’t shy about saying who had done it.
“The main reaction I had was a deep sense of betrayal,” says Schaefer. “I just kept wondering, how could he?” Draper’s bust also forced Schaefer to think about his involvement in the hobby. “It made me realize how very serious a business this was,” he says, “and how I should probably get out while I could. It was no longer fun, and not a game really worth playing anymore. I quickly became less active, I ‘lost’ my blue box and hid a bunch of files I had. I also couldn’t help but feel sorry for John. He’d been kind of a leader and my personal inspiration to become a phreak in the first place. It had all seemed so exciting for a long time, but slowly it became more dangerous and difficult. It just wasn’t worth it anymore.”
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 32