Turn of the Century (101 page)

The New York
Post
has devoted a majority of its front pages for the last four weeks to the story—including
GATES UNDEAD
the day after and
HACKER HOAX
$182
MILLION MAN
the day after that, then
WACKO PRACTICAL JOKERZ!
(over a photo of Willi and Humfried holding up the
Post
story from June about their endlessly ringing corporate-meeting phone prank),
FED DEAD END ON HACKER HOAX
, and
GOLDEN GOULD “SCOT FREE.”

Hank Saddler and Ben have been questioned for days by investigators for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Two major-case units of the office, one for the computer crimes and the other looking into securities crimes, have been handling the case. (The U.S. Attorney in Minnesota made a stink to Washington about wanting to prosecute the hackers, and the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles begged to have Hank Saddler for himself, but New York owns the
whole case.) Ben is proving to be a monumental frustration to the prosecutors—as he is to the confused, appalled editorialists who describe Ben’s profits and the hack alternately as a “recurrence of the cancer of eighties greed” and the defining event of the new century.

The problem for the prosecutors is that Ben Gould seems to have committed no federal securities crime. He learned about the hack fortuitously, by overhearing the hackers at George and Lizzie’s party (“the May 19 Zimbalist-Mactier event” is the FBI term of art), and had in no way conspired with the perpetrators, or met them, or spoken to them. It looks as if he simply did not violate the 1934 Securities Exchange Act, the federal law against insider trading. For a day or so, the
Post
exclusive about the Saturday cliché tally prank at
Newsweek
(GOLDEN GOULD HACKED MAG IN
‘83) looked to his lawyers like a problem. It appeared the same day that the
Journal
quoted Ben gushing to a friend that he’d “bagged two hundo, man”—traderese for $200 million. The U.S. Attorney in New York would love to indict him—if not for securities fraud then at least for wire fraud (the phone calls buying and selling Microsoft stock), or for violating the laws against the manipulation of the stock market. “Hey!” Ben said to his lawyers about those two crimes, “that’s practically the stock trader’s job description right there!” But the consensus among the federal bar (as well as the guests, night after night, on Geraldo Rivera’s TV program) is that it would be a stretch for the government to indict Gould, that a conviction might make new law but the case would probably be thrown out. And Washington, buying into that consensus, has overruled the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.
GORE GOT GOULD GOLD
, the
Post
headlined its page-one story about Ben’s “lame duck Xmas gift from the administration” the other day, which suggested that Ben’s years of contributions to Democratic campaigns had put the fix in at Justice. A class-action suit has been filed against Bennett Gould Partners on behalf of Microsoft shareholders (erstwhile shareholders, in fact, the ones who sold in the frenzy of November 29 during the hoax), which Ben knows will cause several million of his new two hundo to disappear in legal bills. But on Wall Street, as a result of his spur-of-the-moment, end-of-the-day, $19 million magnanimity to Sam Zyberk, Ben Gould is God.

Hank Saddler may yet be indicted. Unlike Ben, he tried to contact the hackers after overhearing their scheme at the May 19 Zimbalist-Mactier
event. Even stupider, he posted his chat room message right in the middle of the hoax,
GATES AND BALLMER OF MSFT ARE DEAD!
which NASDAQ caught with the surveillance software it uses to monitor internet chat rooms and bulletin boards for disinformation intended to push stock prices up or down. The government is worried they won’t be able to prosecute anyone successfully. But somebody must be prosecuted. Hank Saddler is the most indictable, so he will probably be indicted. As far as Hank is concerned, he’s already suffered enough. On the thirtieth of November, the day after the hoax, before he knew he was in trouble with the law, WinWin.com sent him an automatic e-mail message informing him that he was being dropped from the WinWin.com Winners’ Circle, as of the end of the month, because of his “November trading reversals,” but that he would be welcome to continue making WinWin.com electronic trades “on a regular low-cost commission basis.”

George and Lizzie have been investigated too. “You’re a business associate and/or personal friend of Michael Milken, Mr. Mactier, isn’t that correct?” a twenty-seven-year-old assistant U.S. Attorney asked George during one of his afternoons in the stifling, fluorescent room down on Foley Square. The prosecutors became particularly interested in Lizzie after they discovered that Mike Zimbalist (“aka Meshuggah Mike the Manipulator,” according to an old FBI file) was involved in a faked seaplane accident in British Honduras in 1951; that her stepbrother, Ronnie, was a former cocaine dealer and DEA informant; and that her signature on the federal probation affidavit concerning Fanny Taft’s employment was forged by her assistant. (On
Inside Edition
, Alexi volunteered to “go to the electric chair to prove Lizzie’s innocence if that’s what’s necessary.”) But yesterday the prosecutors conceded to George and Lizzie’s lawyers that, no, they haven’t developed any evidence at all that either of their clients had been aware of the hackers’ plans, or profited from the hoax. (George and Lizzie hired separate lawyers—“just like JonBenét’s parents,” Zip Ingram said.) The same assistant U.S. Attorney who pressed George on his close friendship with Milken also questioned Sarah and Max about their participation in the May-19-event discussions, but the derisive press coverage
(KIDDIES GRILLED IN HACKER HOAX)
actually hastened the prosecutors’ decision to leave George and Lizzie alone. “The children do not have a problem,” the family’s lawyers
assured them. Both George and Lizzie have been struck over the last month by the comforting vagueness of that lawyer’s locution—“We need to determine if you have a problem,” “You may have a problem,” “We think you don’t have a big problem.” As it turns out, no one in the family has a problem.

Everybody in the world knows that Fanny, Humfried, and Willibald are the hackers. Everybody knows they violated various federal and Minnesota statutes. Fanny has tried to stay out of the limelight. But the Germans have consented to be interviewed by any newspaper (the
Post:
GERMAN HACKER’S COMMIE YOUTH
) or magazine (
Time:
ANTI-HEROES
) or TV program (Diane Sawyer: “Willi and Humfried—was it your intention to hurt America?”) that calls. Because they’re young and skinny and bright and have little beards and cute accents, America is treating Hummer and Willi as mischievous, magical, lovable imps. They’ve appeared on Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s shows. On Letterman, Humfried used Dave’s desk telephone to set off the burglar alarm system at the home of a CBS executive, live on the air. They are careful, of course, never to admit explicitly to the Reuters hack, but the giggles and the coy, convoluted questions and answers are all part of their particular form of celebrity, a kind of feel-good O.J. lite. “Now, Willi—may I call you Willi?—if I assume that a guy
like
you, but
not
you, would feel pretty darned great after he’d tricked the entire free world into believing that Bill Gates kicked the bucket, would you agree with me?”

Everyone knows they committed crimes punishable by years in prison. But the public seems not to care at all, a new death-of-outrage which William Bennett has been following the Germans from TV studio to TV studio decrying. The hackers didn’t intend to hurt anyone, neither Gates and Ballmer nor the panicky shareholders. The news service computer system was back up and running by four o’clock the same day, and now that Reuters has proposed hiring Willibald and Humfried, according to the
Times
, “as security consultants, on a short-term basis,” popular opinion has exculpated them entirely. The other victims of the crime (or “victims,” as the word is routinely styled in news stories) are not exactly sympathetic figures. No one feels very sorry for Gates or Ballmer, or for the greedy stock speculators who rushed to abandon the company instead of grieving over the deaths of two flesh-and-blood human beings.

The FBI has been unable to find any hard evidence of their crime: no disks and no hard drives, no incriminating e-mails or printed documents or telephone records. And the government lacks any real leverage with which to split Willibald from Humfried or turn either one against their American friend. When an FBI agent told Willi he might be deported, he asked her cheerfully and more or less in earnest, “Does that mean you pay for the plane ticket?” And after three weeks of conversations with Fanny Taft, the prosecutors were unable to persuade her to sign a cooperation agreement. She would not flip. In one of their discussions with the U.S. Attorney, her lawyers had sketched pretty clearly the secret information concerning certain senior federal officials that Fanny hacked out of the Kennedy School computer at Harvard in 1998. But whether that influenced the government’s decision not to prosecute, her lawyers just don’t know.

Lizzie looks up from
The Way We Live Now
, the Trollope novel. “Oh, God.”

George looks up from the thick, perfect-bound Home Again holiday catalogue, which he’s been reading for the last half hour instead of
The Death of Artemio Cruz
, the Carlos Fuentes novel he’s been trying to read for a month. “What?”

“We never ordered the present for Zip. The plum pudding globe.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Good boy.”

And they return to their reading. George and Lizzie’s lawyers have said it would be a mistake for them both to go to the Caribbean for Christmas. And they are exhausted by the prospect of driving all the way up to Lake Marten. So they are at home on Christmas Eve, the children all snug in their beds, George and Lizzie sprawled leg over leg on the old couch in their bedroom in their converted cocoa-and-coffee warehouse at the Seaport.

She slaps the Trollope down on her chest. “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” he says, not looking up. “Johnny, probably.”

Then he lifts his head and meets her look. Although it is an event from the depths of his Lost Time, George does remember leaving Johnny’s corpse duct-taped in the Prada shopping bag on the street.

“There were two light thuds, one right after another. All the way downstairs.”

“Did you do the alarm?”

She shakes her head. They both look at the clock, and listen. At midnight the alarm system switches on automatically. It’s only half past ten.

George says, “If it was a burglar, he’d—”

“Shhh.”

They hear nothing.

“Santa,” he whispers.

“Shhh!”

They hear nothing.

Lizzie whispers, “You know I’ve always worried about break-ins on holidays because they think you’re gone.”

“Doesn’t that mean we should talk in normal voices, so he’ll know we’re here?”

“Go downstairs and check.”

George rolls his eyes, waits two seconds, and then swings his legs off her and the couch. Scanning the room, he sees her fancy new ice-climbing ax behind the TV, grabs it, and creeps out to the landing.

Lizzie hops up and heads to the closet. She needs a cigarette. The trouble is, she hasn’t smoked at home since the summer, and she’s forgotten her last hiding place. Standing on tiptoe, she reaches back on the stationery shelf, then steps left and tiptoes higher to feel around George’s old-vinyl-LP shelf. She knows what she’s touched the instant she touches it, but doesn’t know for sure it isn’t a toy until she slides it forward and brings it down.

George has a pistol. He must have bought it while she was in Asia. It disgusts her, like vermin, like a snake. She is scared, frightened retroactively, to imagine he was ever nutty enough to buy a gun. She stands in the closet, holding it by the trigger guard with two fingers, staring at it, wondering what George’s addled plan was. Shoot Mose? Shoot her? Shoot himself? Shoot her and then himself, like some tragic, stupid, drunken off-duty cop in the Bronx?

“I’ll get it for you,” she hears George say. “But I’m honestly not sure where it is.”

George is talking to someone in the hallway. He is talking to the burglar.

Lizzie peeks out. Across the bedroom and out the door she sees George. He’s still holding the ice ax, stepping slowly, cautiously sideways
and backward down the hall toward the stairs to the fourth floor. He disappears, and then she hears the burglar—

“I need the cartridge. It’s my key asset.”

—before she sees him step into view. It’s Chas Prieve. He’s holding a hunting knife.

“That’s the only one left now,” she watches him say, “and I really need it. It’s my key asset.” He steps out of view, following George. And she hears him say, “I
deserve
to hurt her. You probably don’t know she sent Malaysian thugs after me? She did.”

“Listen,” Lizzie hears George say, his voice fading as he moves down the hall, “we’re going to find your disk in my office, and you’ll be fine. Okay?”