As far as shedding real or fake tears at Hugh's the night of April 11, 1991, Meltzer said that one of the things he likes best about Kevin is his spirit. "He hasn't whined once, and the sense of humor you heard in your conversations with him is the real Kevin."

Poulsen describes his life during his SRI period as fine, balanced and steady. "I received regular promotions and raises at work," he said. "I wasn't perfect. If I enjoyed a project, I was as diligent a worker as anyone could hope for, but if I was bored by a task, I neglected it."

Poulsen said of his social life during the 1980's, during which the allegations addressed in the San Francisco indictment are said to have taken place, "I wasn't a party animal, but I wouldn't mind being characterized as one."

A typical day involved "long hours and sometimes evenings" at the office, followed by either sleep, partying or programming. Let me tell you, as a reporter who lives in Silicon Valley and who has several friends "in the business," 70 or 80 hour work weeks are not unusual. I couldn't help noticing while perusing court documents that the law enforcement list of items found in a search of roommate and co-defendent Mark Lottor's stuff included items like, "blue glass water pipe" and "10 plastic film canisters containing dried vegetable matter and/or seeds," labeled "Jamaican," "Hawaiian," and "California Sinse."

Kevin is not, outwardly, on good terms with his alleged co-conspirators in either trial. Several have copped pleas, which is understandable, a realist would admit, to save their own asses. "You inspire such loyalty," Meltzer joked with him during one of our conference calls. It is a perhaps indicative of Kevin Poulsen's character that he promised Lottor, that he would testify that all the equipment found in "The Switchroom" was his own and not Lottor's. This, however, was before Poulsen dyed his hair and disappeared for a year and a half. Maybe that completes the character profile.

Co-defendents Lottor and Gilligan (1st indictment), Ron Austin (also convicted in the 1983 California break-in; Kevin was underage), and Justin Petersen (AKA Eric Hines), in the second indictment, have all plead guilty, are awaiting sentencing, and are loath to utter anything that could hurt their relationship with the government right now (i.e., say anything nice about Kevin). It would be interesting to interview a few of these guys after they're sentenced. One of them told me that right now, "it is necessary to keep up certain appearances."

While no one on either side is admitting anything, it appears obvious that one of the two co-defendents in the Los Angeles indictment had something to do with Poulsen's ill-fated Hugh's trip. "They've got a whole gaggle of snitches down there," Meltzer said. "Typical case of people who have committed some kind of violation, and then have agreed to talk in order to save themselves."

The picture perhaps come into slightly more focus if one examines the court documents in the L.A. case, which indicate that Petersen was not only facing charges for a number of "serious" offenses in Texas (a friend of Kevin's from Southern California who didn't want his name used referred to at least one of the crimes as drug-related), but that he made a phone call to the FBI on April 10, 1991. Hmmm. Poulsen got picked up at Hugh's on April 11. The friend said that Petersen ran wire taps for private investigators, and that "if you knew what he (Petersen) had been up to, and you see that Kevin Poulsen is the one in jail without bail, it really makes you wonder how the government picks its targets."

Austin and Poulsen had been friends since the early '80s, obviously. Why they took up with a character like Petersen is anyone's guess. Austin is now a store clerk in Southern California while he awaits sentencing.

The L.A. indictment remains shrouded in a smog-screen of mystery. Meltzer isn't even positive he'll be representing Kevin in that trial (he probably will), and Poulsen didn't want to say anything that could adversely affect him during the first trial.

Basically Kevin's life during the "fugitive" period was normal. He had friends, said the Southern California source, "and he is nothing like the loner that the woman they all quote has made him out to be." At one point during this period, Kevin was arrested and released by the Los Angeles Police, who obviously didn't realize who they had. This source of mine, who demanded from a befuddled Spin receptionist the phone number of, "the guy doing the story about Kevin Poulsen," added the insight that Kevin wasn't really a fugitive at all. It took the government until 1990, more than a year after his arrest in Menlo Park, to come up with the San Francisco indictment (which, just to complicate matters, has been since superseded by a new, 14-count indictment, the one with the espionage charge). "What was he supposed to do, just sit around waiting by the phone to be charged?" I was asked.

One might want to contemplate, if one is so inclined, how federal authorities managed to crack the code in which Poulsen had encrypted his documents stored in a Southern California store room (a new one, not owned by Larry Tyson). Poulsen had used a D.E.S. algorithm, a pre-Clipper system which the federal government had once assured the public it couldn't crack (for privacy reasons). My Southern California source offered the view that the delay in the Los Angeles indictment (April, 1993) was due to the government's mad attempts to break the D.E.S. code. "It's breakable these days by anyone with a million dollars for a machine with adequate speed," Banisar of CPSR said. "It's something like 2 to the 56K computations." Curioser and curioser.

There's another person, as well, named as an unindicted "co-conspirator" in the L.A. case, (one Henry Spiegel, AKA Corey Phillip Reuben). Schindler gave me the big "No Comment" on other players who could be indicted or are cooperating. Plus, the spectacular 4-page L.A. Justice Department press release lists "an ongoing investigation into computer...crimes being conducted...In addition to Austin and Petersen, other targets have agreed to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation." Is it just me, or is this starting to sound like a Real Life FBI Case (RLFBIC)? I think the last coyboys have found the True Final Frontier. Gene Rodenberry never quite made it to Cyberspace. And I'm not sure if the Marshall is on the trail or if the posse is still several towns away. Just how deep the Poulsen Well runs (and into which polluted aquifer) will likely become increasingly clear when the L.A. trial approaches and all sides jockey for soundbite position on that set of "facts." Just to show how seriously the computer industry takes the specter of hackers as employees, Poulsen's ex-crony Gilligan, who was implicated in some of the phone fraud parts of the San Francisco indictment before pleading guilty to lesser charges, now works for the same Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, CA that Kevin did at the time of his arrest. "I don't think they're that concerned with my past," Gilligan told me.

Gilligan, who, as did Lottor and Austin, called Poulsen "a nice guy," wouldn't comment on whether he considered Kevin Lee Poulsen a threat to U.S. Security. Poulsen, however, told me that when he called Gilligan to ask why he had copped a plea on "something which he essentially isn't guilty of," he responded that he had a Big Brotherish fear of something bigger than them that would get him one of these days, if not now.

A Pac Bell newsletter dated June 28, 1993 cites the company's eerily-named "Centralized Fraud Bureau" alongside a statistic claiming that phone fraud costs Pac Bell customers $4 billion/year. Now it's tough to pin down what the U.S. government is spending on this case, since no one in his or her right mind will answer such a question, even though it's "our" money, (does one include every agent's salary, every U.S. Attorney's expense account, the cost of ink in thousands of press releases?), but it's got to be in the millions. It kind of makes one wonder what kind of nice little dent in Pac Bell's fraud figure would result from a check made out to them in the amount of the government's expense in prosecuting Kevin Poulsen. But Schindler's comments on the cost of crackers gone wild struck me as worth noting: "Some people have the perception that just because someone's pressing a button on a keyboard, that it's not a crime. And it seems somehow wrong to hold a pimply-faced 16-year-old liable for $6 million. But if a security system worth $6 million is destroyed by unlawful entry, somebody's got to pay to get it fixed. Who should it be?"

Gilligan ventured an observation to me, however, that you get what you pay for in computer security. A company that invests sufficient funds in protecting its system, he reasoned, is much less likely to find it's payroll or credit history violated.

Unless someone really smart and ballsy comes along.

As to charges by Schindler and others that Poulsen brought the publicity surrounding the case on himself, by fleeing and making himself Unsolved Mysteries fodder, Meltzer responded: "It wasn't Kevin who sent out press releases to every news organization in North America after the Northern District indictment."

After all the delays in the proceedings - even the U.S. Attorney handling the case has changed since the original indictments in 1990, and the presiding judge had been reassigned, only to be returned to the trial - the San Francisco-based government case seems to be, if not in shambles, facing difficulties, as charge after charge slips away. Meltzer evidently convinced the court and Crowe that several of the charges against Poulsen resulting from hasty FBI and Pac Bell research were not only false, but technologically impossible based on the equipment he possessed. In one instance a direct access test unit Poulsen possessed was described by investigators as "primarily used for surreptitious monitoring of phone conversations," when in truth the device is used to test if phone lines are operational. Poulsen cited for me a charge of accessing an Army "MASNET" computer which, an e-mail message seems to clearly mark, was actually Gilligan's doing, as an example that the government doesn't know who it's charging with what crime (even Gilligan, supposedly, didn't go any further than the entrance page to the system - see sidebar). These counts, four of them, have been dropped.

Results from the suppression of evidence hearing based primarily on the search of the tapes without a warrant, and the allegedly coerced search of Poulsen's apartment, are pending. Crowe, who like Meltzer said he didn't have much technological knowledge nor any hi-tech litigation experience, didn't sound overly cock sure when I spoke to him in July, considering he has a defendant the press has already convicted, who fled "justice" for 18 months. I asked him if he felt comfortably certain of a conviction, and he said, after a long pause, "Yes....(pause), I'd say yes I feel confident." He could have just been choosing his words carefully, and he went on to explain that a victory can entail conviction on some, but not all counts. Schindler, who has plenty of time, probably four months at least, to prepare his case, said that when it comes time for the L.A. trial in the undetermined future, "We're ready to go."

The truth is, what with the espionage charge and enhancement sentencing based on his flight and clearance-related situation, and his alleged activity as a fugitive, barring significant changes in the legal realities in the case, Poulsen is not looking at a Silicon Valley computer security analyst position in the near future (although he jokingly discussed starting a computer security consulting firm, and Meltzer and I agreed to sign on at the initial public offering). As Meltzer put it from a car phone conversation rife with more of those clicks, buzzes and external voices we couldn't place, "The cumulative charges Kevin faces could put him away for the rest of his life. Anything significantly less than that, I'd consider a victory." One of his co-defendents told me somewhat optimistically that as he sees it, if the espionage charge disappears, the cumulative sentencing guidelines might let Kevin off in the first indictment with little more than time served. Meltzer, clearly, didn't sound so sure.

The sign outside the Alameda County Jail greets visitors on behalf of Charles C. Plummer, a man with the disturbingly ambiguous dual titles of, "Sheriff and Coroner." A horde of several hundred of the most visible victims of our society's disease festered in the mid-morning sun, waiting to visit incarcerated loved ones. I strode past the young mothers and their screaming babies, feeling an odd pang when I realized that outside the prison, there are no walls hiding the problem. As my Nikes echoed through the long white corridor leading to the maximum security wing that Sunday in July, and I finally saw him, looking like a muscle on one of the other inmate's arms, I remember thinking, "what is this...this non-violent...this kid doing here?"

His hair had returned to its natural brown, and the first thing he said to me as he picked up the phone across the Plexiglas was, "How was Alaska?"

I was so stunned by the reality of what I was facing, I didn't realize at first that he was talking about a postcard I had sent him from the Far North with an eagle on the front, in an attempt to convince him to let me interview him.

I tried not to make the glacieted peaks and grizzly bears from my trip sound too spectacular, because I suddenly realized in a very real sense that I was talking to a guy who might be waiting until the dedication of the Al Gore Presidential library before he sees another river.

For his part, Poulsen sounded remarkably confident, overruling Meltzer's suggestion that he decline to answer my question about how much time he would be willing to serve if necessary (on the grounds that it could incriminate himself), by saying, "two years. I think I could handle two years behind bars." Which, he knew I knew, is less time than he's already spent on "the inside".