304“I had been looking at all the expenditures”: Louis J. Rose, author interview, 2006.
304The Texas scandal spread: Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, pp. 271–72.
304The telephone company soon found itself: Brooks, Telephone, p. 311; Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, p. 272.
305“I think we’re going”: Bill Caming, author interview, 2007.
306“arranged for a city councilman” and surrounding description: Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, p. 274.
306thirteen female employees: Ibid., pp. 275–77; “Six Women Testify in Texas Phone Suit,” New York Times, August 28, 1977
306appeals court overturned: Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, p. 278; “$3 Million Award Is Overturned in a Suit Against Southwest Bell,” New York Times, November 30, 1978
306Supreme Court of Texas: Dixon v. Southwestern Bell, 607 S.W.2d 240 (1980), No. B-8208, Supreme Court of Texas, October 22, 1980 (Rehearing Denied November 19, 1980). The Texas Supreme Court did not so much uphold the appeals court ruling as simply decide that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case; Texas law granted its Supreme Court very limited jurisdiction regarding slander cases.
307Intel 8008: Roy Allan, A History of the Personal Computer: The People and the Technology (London, Ontario, Canada: Allan Publishing, 2001); S. P. Morse, B. W. Raveiel, S. Mazor, and W. B. Pohimian, “Intel Microprocessors—8008 to 8086,” IEEE Computer, vol. 13, no. 10, October 1980.
307“first truly usable microprocessor”: Lamont Wood, “Forgotten PC History: The True Origins of the Personal Computer,” Computerworld, August 8, 2008, at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9111341/Forgotten_PC_history_The_true_origins_of_the_personal_computer.
307“Project Breakthrough!”: Popular Electronics, January 1975, cover and pp. 23ff.
308“The only word which could come to mind”: Levy, Hackers, p. 192.
309Wozniak would show off: Ibid., p. 250.
309“Jobs placed ads”: Ibid., p. 253.
Chapter 21: Nightfall
311“Well, let’s see”: Bill Acker, author interview, 2007.
312The new legal standard: See, for example, United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellee v. Michael William Clegg, Defendant-Appellant, No. 74-2557, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, 509 F.2d 605 (1975), March 5, 1975.
312Draper walked out of Lompoc: Peter Gorner and Michael Smith, “They Still Fear Captain Crunch,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 1977, p. 4
312slopped pigs: John Draper, “Prisons Are the Universities of Crime,” at http://www.webcrunchers.com/stories/prisons.html.
313PDP-6: Levy, Hackers, p. 95.
313“A WATS extender is used”: Stephen Wozniak, “An Apple for the Captain,” Infoworld, October 1, 1984, p. 57.
313Draper cracked: Ibid.
313disliked Draper: Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, p. 205.
314microcomputer laboratory: Bell Laboratories, “Evidence Examination Report: Pennsylvania State Police Incident No. N6-39474, Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania Case No. 23-50-E77,” December 14, 1977
314“plenty of music, fun, and information”: John Draper, handwritten flyer titled “Capt’n Crunch Party,” 1977
314party crashers (and surrounding description): Howard Smith and Leslie Harlib, “The Captain Is Crunched Again,” Village Voice, January 16, 1978
314watching Draper like a hawk (and subsequent description): Bell of Pennsylvania, “Case Summary of John Thomas Draper,” September 8, 1978
315start of a lengthy nightmare (and subsequent description): Smith and Harlib, “The Captain Is Crunched Again.” Stories vary as to whether the red box was found on Draper’s person or in his car.
315At one point during the trial: Ken Hopper, author interview, 2006.
316sentenced to three to six months: Mike Joseph, “‘Phone Phreak’ Jailed for 3 to 6 Months,” Pocono Record, August 19, 1978, p. 17
316“I just have a feeling”: K. C. Mason (UPI), “Highrise Joe Is a Whiz in Spite of Blindness,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, July 4, 1982, p. 8G.
316offered Engressia a job: Description of Engressia’s conversation with Leger from Joybubbles, author interview, 2006.
317“You wouldn’t believe the pressure”: Lloyd Leger, author interview, 2007.
317“I feel the Bell insignia”: “The Whistler and the Captain—Veterans of Phone ‘Fixing,’” New York Times, March 27, 1978, p. D3
3184ESS: Joel, Switching Technology, p. 294.
318“tend[s] to pass himself off as the victim”: Dr. Robert B. Blumberg, psychiatric evaluation of John T. Draper, August 17, 1978 (included in Draper’s 1976 court records).
318 “numerous paranoid delusions”: O’Neil S. Dillon, MD, psychiatric evaluation of John T. Draper, December 6, 1978 (included in Draper’s 1976 court records).
319“Is this not simple?”: Pete Carey, “Cap’n Crunch Programs His Way from Jail to Success,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1983, p. D1
319TAP: In 1979 the phone phreak newsletter changed its name again, this time from Technological American Party to Technological Assistance Program. Was this because they were becoming less political? Not so much, said Cheshire Catalyst in 2010. “It had more to do with the difficulty of opening up a bank account when you have the word ‘Party’ in your name.”
319Third Annual Phone Phreak Convention: YIPL ran phone phreak conventions in 1972 and 1973, but a dry spell followed until THC-79.
319“For several reasons, I have permanently retired”: John Draper, “Greetings” (open letter to THC-79 attendees), TAP, no. 59, September–October 1979.
320“While intrepidly trekking”: Cheshire Catalyst, “The News Is In from the West, and It’s Beige,” TAP, no. 51, July 1978, p. 4.
320CBBS: Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, “Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board,” Byte, vol. 3, no. 11, pp. 150–57.
320first phone phreak/hacker BBSes: Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 44; see also a description of the 8BBS in Santa Clara, California, which ran from 1980 to 1982, at http://everything2.com/title/8BBS.
321“Enclosed for Bureau”: FBI file 117-HQ-2905, serial “X,” April 30, 1979
321“nuclear yield”: FBI file 117-HQ-2905, serial 3, August 24, 1979
321Judge Harold Greene: In an odd coincidence, in 1980 as part of a totally separate case, Judge Greene “ordered the FBI to stop destroying its surveillance files and to design a plan in which no files could be destroyed until historians and archivists could review them for historical value.” As it turns out, large chunks of this book are based on such FBI files, which might well have been destroyed were it not for Judge Greene’s order. See William Yurcik, “Judge Harold H. Greene: A Pivotal Figure in Telecommunications Policy and His Legacy,” IEEE Global History
Network, at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/images/1/1d/Yurcik.pdf. p. 16, and John Anthony Scott, “The FBI Files: A Challenge for Historians,” Perspectives on History, March 1980, at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1980/8003/8003new1.cfm.
321statistics are mind numbing: Yurcik, “Judge Harold H. Greene.”
321broken up into eight different companies: Coll, Deal of the Century; Kimberly Zarkin and Michael J. Zarkin, The Federal Communications Commission: Front Line in the Culture and Regulation Wars (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).
Epilogue
325The town of Wawina: Bob Riddell, author interview, 2012.
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325108 historical telephones (and surrounding description): Gail Van Horn (AP), “Small Entrepreneur Owns 148 Telephones,” Spokesman Review, October 3, 1976, p. B3.
325“ask your mother to help you”: Telephone World website, “Sounds and Recordings from Wawina, MN,” at http://www.phworld.org/sounds/wawina.
325no other place in the continental United States: Note the qualifier “continental.” The town of Livengood, Alaska, also had a 2,600 Hz–based telephone system, but it went away sometime in 2011. See “The Death of Livengood” on the Binary Revolution Forums website, at http://www.binrev.com/forums/index.php/topic/44301-the-death-of-livengood.
326several hours of goodbyes: You can listen to them at the Telephone World website, phworld.org.
326“even callow youths”: Jake Locke, email to author, 2011.
327looked like he would be going to prison for ten years: “Bookmaking Sentence Against 3 Reimposed,” Miami News, December 18, 1969, p. 10A.
327“Gil Beckley would be distinctly more valuable”: “Crime: No. 11 Off the Boards,” Time, March 2, 1970.
327shot dead and stuffed into the trunk of a car: AP, “Fugitive Mike Thevis Back in Custody,” Spartanburg Herald, November 10, 1978, p. B1.
327Flamboyant mob attorney: Frank Murray, “Ben Cohen Cries ‘Mercy,’ Is Led Off to Jail,” Miami News, November 30, 1966; “Ben Cohen, Mr. Big Criminal Lawyer, Dies in Miami Beach of Cancer at 76,” Miami News, August 28, 1979, p. 4A.
328612 was the area code: George Monaghan, “The Child in a Man,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, September 19, 1991, p. 1E.
328Found a high-rise: Gene Collier, “There’s Martin Luther King, There’s Gandhi . . . and There’s Fred Rogers,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 9, 2003.
328began calling himself Joybubbles: Andrew T. Huse, interview with Joybubbles, University of South Florida Oral History Program, August 23, 2004. Monaghan, in “The Child in a Man,” puts the year Engressia began calling himself Joybubbles as 1988.
328“We were on a retreat”: Jim Ragsdale, “One Name Says It All,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, November 27, 2005, p. A1.
328“I’m a survivor”: Huse, interview with Joybubbles.
329legally changed his name: Ibid.
329“Nobody knows how much peace”: Collier, “There’s Martin Luther King.”
329selected it to be the word processor: John Markoff and Paul Freiberger, “Visit with Cap’n Software, Forthright Forth Enthusiast,” Infoworld, October 11, 1982, p. 31.
329“wealthy executive”: Pete Carey, “Cap’n Crunch Programs His Way from Jail to Success,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1983, p. D1.
329personal fortunes were crumbling: Alexander Besher, “The Crunching of America,” Infoworld, June 18, 1984, p. 66.
329forging tickets to BART: Gary Richards, “‘Captain Crunch’ Charged in Ticket Forgery,” San Jose Mercury News, January 9, 1987, p. 1B; “John Draper at AutoDesk,” DigiBarn Computer Museum interview with John Draper, May 2006, at http://www.digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-john-draper-autodesk.
330where-are-they-now newspaper article: Chris Rhodes, “The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2007.
330TAP ceased publication: See http://artofhacking.com/tap. In 1989 another group not affiliated with the original TAP crew restarted the newsletter and printed issues 92 through 107.
330a new hacker/phone phreak publication: “AHOY!” 2600, January 1984, p. 1.
330area code “321”: “3-2-1, Call Cape Canaveral,” New York Times, November 23, 1999.
331–332 wired telephone lines . . . had peaked: Trends in Telephone Service, Federal Communications Commission, September 2010, at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-301823A1.pdf.
333“It was the magic of the fact”: Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, interview with Steve Jobs from “Silicon Valley: A 100-Year Renaissance,” 1998, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI.
334MIT students proudly displayed: Russell Ryan, Zack Anderson, and Alessandro Chiesa, “Anatomy of a Subway Hack,” at http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf; Michael McGraw-Herdeg and Marissa Vogt, “MBTA Sues Three Students to Stop Speech on Subway Vulnerabilities,” The Tech, August 25, 2008.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing is often said to be a lonely endeavor. Yet as I look back over the five years I spent researching and writing this book, I am awed and humbled both by the number of people who have been involved and all the things they have contributed. People have shared their stories with me, given me documents and recordings and historical artifacts, made introductions on my behalf, answered my questions, processed my Freedom of Information Act requests, helped me with writing or editing or research, and encouraged me to keep at it.
I am most grateful to those I interviewed or corresponded with to collect their stories; this book would not exist without them. Sadly, not everyone who shared something with me could be featured as a character or even quoted in this book. Regardless, every person I talked to contributed bits of context that I hope I have been able to mold into a collective and coherent history. I would like to thank the following:
The phone phreaks, telephone enthusiasts, telecommunications experts, and their friends and relations: George A., Ralph Barclay, Jack Bariton, Fred Belton, Mark Bernay, Sid Bernay, Trudy Boardman, Ed Buckley, John-Elmer Canfield, Cheshire Catalyst, Colin Chambers, Bob Clements, David Condon, John Covert, Mark Cuccia, Al Diamond, Richard Dillman, Jed Donnelley, Evan Doorbell, John Draper, Ron “Ducks,” Stephen Dunne, Tom Edison, Esther Engressia, Toni Engressia, Jim Fettgather, Alan Fierstein, Don Froula, Al Gilbertson, Bob Gudgel, Grant Gysbers, Anita Harris, Max Hauser, Dennis Heinz, John Higdon, Doug Humphrey, Joybubbles, Roy Kaylor, Nagy Khattar, Francis Kriokorian, David Kulka, Robert LaFond, Tony Lauck, David Lewis, Kim Lingo, Robert Lipman,Jake Locke, Rudolph Loew, Lucky225, Greg MacPherson, Joe Maximetz, John McNamara, Chuck Meyer, Onnig Minasian, Stuart Nelson, Jay from New York, Stephen Owades, Jon D. Paul of the Crypto-Museum, Jerry Petrizze, Rick Plath, M. J. Poirier, Tom Politeo, Jim Prather, Larry Rachman, Jodd Readick, Bob Reite, Bob Riddell, “Rogtag,” Ed Ross, Jim Roth, John Sawyer, Adam Schoolsky, Robert Shaw, Bill Squire, Hoyt Stearns, David Tarnowski, Denny Teresi, John Treichler, Brough Turner, Rick Turner, Richard Weissberg, Steve Wozniak, Herb Yeates, and Norm Zimon.
Former employees of the telephone companies and their associates, friends, and families: H. W. William (Bill) Caming of AT&T, Bob Ginnings of Hekimian Labs, Ken Hopper and Amos E. Joel Jr. of Bell Laboratories, Helmut Kaunzinger of Pacific Telephone, Rob Mang of New York Telephone, Bob McLuckie of BC Telephone, Wayne Perrin of Pacific Telephone, Nelson Saxe of AT&T Long Lines, Walter Schmidt (and his son and daughter-in-law, Bill and Julia) of General Telephone, Swede Sorensen of Pacific Telephone, Ed Turnley of Southern Bell and AT&T, and John Whitman and H. Richard Zapf of New York Telephone.
Members of the law enforcement community: Jay Cochran, Bob Federspiel, Dennis Feine, Harold “Skip” Gladden, Bill Harward, Bud Heister, Dick Lytle, Edwin J. Sharp, Bill Snell, Ray Wannall, Warren Welsh, and Jack Wilgus, all formerly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bill Earle, a former Justice Department attorney, and Floy Dawson, a former assistant U.S. attorney.
Members of the press: Wayne Green, Ron Kessler, Louis J. Rose, and Ron Rosenbaum.
Much of the material in this book is based on documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the civil servants responsible for handling this often thankless task deserve recognition. Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the agency that spent the most time investigating phone phreaks, it had the misfortune to receive the lion’s share of my FOIA requests, more than 350 in all. Its representatives bore up under this paper onslaught with professionalism and
even the occasional bit of laughter. At the FBI I am indebted to Dottie Bailey, Kathleen Boyle, Craig Clevenger, Theresa Fowler, Kim Garver, Margaret Jackson, Moira Lattimore, Kara Lewis, Debbie Lopes, Candy McCulloh, Travis Mumaw, Patricia Nice, Becky Peterson, Tonia Robertson, Loren Shaver, David Sobonya, Mike Stevens, Lori Synnamon, Erin Uptigraph, and Marla Williamson—to say nothing of the many other members of the FBI Record/Information Dissemination Section whose names I don’t know and who toiled behind the scenes processing my requests. My thanks, too, go to the staff at the Department of Justice Office of Information Policy, who handled my several FOIA appeals. At the Department of Justice Criminal Division, Kathleen Segui was most helpful. At the National Security Agency, Pamela Phillips and Marianne Stupar and their nameless staff worked diligently on several of my requests, including one that took almost three years to complete. Other historical documents came from the National Archives and Records Administration, where I am particularly grateful to Steven Tilley and Jay Olin for slogging through box after box of records in search of old memos and files.
At the AT&T Corporate Archives, George Kupczak and Bill Caughlin helped with my research requests and were kind enough to let me spend two days at their facility in New Jersey. Sellam Ismail of VintageTech was good enough to open his archives for me as well.
Several people deserve special thanks. One is Bill Acker, a phone phreak and twenty-seven-year veteran of the Bell System who spent hundreds of hours on the phone with me, reliving stories, answering my questions, and patiently explaining bits of telephone network esoterica. Another is Ken Hopper, a former distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories and the head of its Telephone Crime Lab; even though he was quite ill at the time, Ken and his wife, Barbara, let me invade their home and spent days with me reviewing documents, remembering cases, answering questions, and making introductions. Charlie Pyne hosted me at his home, answered numerous questions, and worked diligently to track down relevant FBI files and the Fine Arts 13 notebook. John Gilbert, Wayne Perrin, Alan Rubinstein, Steve Sawyer, and Ed Turnley all helped with thoughtful discussions and treasure troves of old documents and recordings. Former FBI assistant director Edwin J. Sharp educated me on the fight against organized crime in the 1960s and introduced me to numerous former FBI special agents, all while keeping my spirits up with well-timed emails of encouragement. Michael Ravnitzky, my Freedom of Information Act guru and an irrepressible researcher, helped craft FOIA requests and appeals, solved missing-person puzzles, decoded FBI files, and dug up amazing bits of relevant history on his own initiative. Mio Cohen imposed order on chaos by developing a filing system that allowed me to actually locate and use the thousands of documents and records I had amassed. Jordan Hayes, the best system administrator in the world, supported my requests for domain names and Web hosting with patience and humor. Jackie Cheong loaned me her quiet office so I could write; her husband, Curt Hardyck, denied me the office wifi password so that I actually would write. Jason Scott of textfiles.com offered invaluable insights, guidance, introductions, and feedback. Steven Gibb, the executor of Joybubbles’s estate, graciously provided access to Joybubbles’s (né Joe Engressia’s) old tapes and documents. Sam Etler, Steph Kerman, and Mark Cuccia became my go-to resources for technical questions about the telephone network of the 1960s and ’70s.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 44