users--went
out the door as "evidence." Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg
had lost about 800 megabytes of data.

Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to phone the Secret
Service and ask how the case was going. That was the first time that
Robert Izenberg would ever hear the name of William Cook. As of
January 1992, a full two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not
charged with any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the
courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' worth of seized
equipment.

In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press
coverage. The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed a
UNIX bulletin-board system, and met with no operational difficulties
whatsoever.

Except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the Legion of
Doom. "The Mentor" voluntarily shut down "The Phoenix Project." It
seemed a pity, especially as telco security employees had, in fact,
shown up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped--along with the usual motley
crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and wannabes. There
was "Sandy" Sandquist from US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry
Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself! Kluepfel had been trading friendly
banter with hackers on Phoenix since January 30th (two weeks after the
Martin Luther King Day Crash). The presence of such a stellar telco
official seemed quite the coup for Phoenix Project.

Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in ruins, Phrack in
deep trouble, something weird going on with UNIX nodes--discretion was
advisable. Phoenix Project went off-line.

Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD bulletin board for
his own purposes--and those of the Chicago unit. As far back as June
1987, Kluepfel had logged on to a Texas underground board called
"Phreak Klass 2600." There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster named
"Shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling AT&T computer files,
and bragging of his ambitions to riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with
trojan horse programs. Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in
Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door in Secret Service
custody, and Shadowhawk himself had gone to jail.

Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project postured about
"legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked of the
underground. It had Phrack on it. It had the E911 Document. It had a
lot of dicey t