The man under her boot moaned happily. Working as a dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon in the San Fernando Valley was better than walking down the street, and the money was prodigious. At the Leather Castle, her name was Jeanine; newly sober and happy to be alive, she held the business side of the whip. She charged the men hundreds of dollars for a half-hour session just to lick their feet, more than enough money to buy all the computer equipment she wanted.
Her little apartment in Van Nuys was fully equipped – she called it the hacker’s lair. She set up her own four-way conference call line, Instant Relay, and spent her free time posting on message board systems about phone flaws and vulnerabilities. In her first post on the phreaker 8BBS forum, she excitedly announced herself. “I’m new to the computer phreak and don’t know much about systems and access. However, I’ve been a phone addict for a while and know a lot about phones… by the way, I’m a 6ft 2in blond female with hazel eyes, weighing 140, and I love to travel.”
Needless to say, she raised her eyebrows – there weren’t many leggy blondes in the phone hacking scene. But she was far from the most visible phreaker in Los Angeles. That title went to Lewis DePayne, a 20-year-old USC student known on the telephone subway as “Roscoe.” He had recently been the subject of a cover story in The weekly, in which he boasted that he could use his mastery of the telephone network’s electronic systems to cancel bills, mark up free airline tickets and hotel reservations, and alter credit scores. Lewis was a scholar and, like Susan, liked to be in control. the THE weekly reporter wrote that he dialed phones “like Bobby Fischer moves chess pieces.”
Lewis also ran a conference line – HOBO UFO (462-6836) – in a Hollywood apartment littered with phone manuals, computer parts and recording equipment. Most of his callers were high school and college kids who had heard about HOBO UFO through the grapevine; Lewis listened to their ambient chatter in his apartment day and night. He was the Wizard of Oz, and Susan always made it a point to see behind the curtain. She called it HOBO UFO, and when she hopped on the line, Lewis recalls, she played it cool. She acted like she already knew Lewis and like he needed to know who she was too.
When Lewis first saw Susan in person, he immediately timed her. Her descriptions of herself were accurate: she was very tall, looking through feathery blonde bangs on the six-foot DePayne. He asked her what she did for a living. With unusual reluctance, she didn’t mention the leather castle. Instead, she told him she was a sex therapist. He straightened up.
They started spending time together, exchanging notes and sharing material. An object of mutual fascination was the TI Silent-700, a portable terminal with an acoustic modem and two rubber cups into which a telephone handset could be inserted. Some nights, Lewis brought Susan to the computer center at USC, and she watched him surf the networks across the country. He introduced her to his close friend, Kevin Mitnick, a teenage phreaker and amateur radio operator who would later spend most of the 1990s on the run from federal authorities.
Lewis wasn’t the kind of guy Susan normally looked for. He was blunt, almost puritanical, preferring coffee, donuts, and late nights browsing electronic databases to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. He kept diligent records, filling notebooks with the names of local telephone carriers and access codes that could give him access to the computer systems of airlines, private companies, Western Union and the DMV. Collecting this information was its own form of power. Knowing how to use it has made this pale, serious young man one of the most dangerous people in Los Angeles.
Suzanne fell in love.
She and her new friends scoured the city at night, searching for unsecured dumpsters outside the telephone company offices. The manuals and internal memos they stole from the trash were maps of parts of the telephone network that were hidden. By leveraging the information they found in the dumpsters – from internal jargon to access codes and employee names – they were able to pull off more complex and ambitious scams.
It helped Kevin and Lewis to have a collaborator; targets were more likely to trust her on the phone, especially when playing a telephonist, who were, at the time, all female. It was a role that Susan enjoyed playing. Misrepresentation and subterfuge came easily to him. As a social engineer, she has always considered herself at least their equal. Lewis, who was always more interested in the technical than the human side of their craft, disagreed.
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