Michelle Quinn, Laura Evenson, Chronicle Staff Writers

It was that addiction that brought him down Wednesday morning in Raleigh, N.C., when he walked into an electronic net set for him by a group of computer experts from California.

What emerged in interviews with several of his victims and one of his friends is a picture of a lonely, social misfit, who dreamed of one day holding down a job working with computers.

While he has not been known to use the vast amount of information at his fingertips for financial gain, he has often been dubbed by authorities as a ``dark-side hacker'' who used his skills of digging into computer systems to hurt his enemies, including stealing their electronic mail.

The only son of divorced parents, Mitnick grew up in the San Fernando Valley as a quiet, lonely kid with some technical knack, according to ``Cyberpunk,'' a 1991 book written by Katie Hafner and John Markoff. Mitnick's mother worked as a waitress and was never home in the evening; his father was rarely around.

In his isolation, he became an amateur ham radio operator and a phone phreak, someone who taps into the telephone system by getting the right access codes. He also became expert in calling up

companies and pretending he was a computer repairman in order to get access to telephone numbers and company codes.

He idealized the character played by Robert Redford in the movie ``Three Days of the Condor.'' It was the story of a English graduate student hired by the CIA to extract plots of novels. In one scene, Redford pretends he is a telephone lineman and crosses wires to get bad guys off his track.

Mitnick ran into trouble at an early age. He was part of a gang of hackers in Los Angeles and tapped into a computer system at Monroe High School. At 17, he stole manuals from Pacific Bell and also stole software from Microport Systems of Santa Cruz, getting probation both times due to his age.

In 1988, he was convicted of computer fraud. Judge Mariana Pfaelzer likened Mitnick's hacking to a drug addiction and ordered him into therapy, prohibiting him from using a computer or telephone while in prison. He served one year.

In June 1992, Mitnick went to work for Teltec Investigations Inc., in Calabasas in Los Angeles County. Then in late September of that year, FBI agents asked to search Mitnick's office.

A warrant had been issued accusing Mitnick of violating the terms of his federal probation, which forbids him to access a computer illegally. At the same time, the California Department of Motor Vehicles was accusing him of posing as a law enforcement officer to gain classified information and possibly to create false identities for himself.

Since then, he had been on the run.

According to an affidavit, the FBI was conducting a computer- and wire-fraud investigation into computer hacking, including unauthorized entry into Pacific Bell Telephone Co. computers. Mitnick was named as a suspect.

In therapy, Mitnick lost 100 of his nearly 300 pounds and worked on his self-esteem. He got himself a license plate which read ``X Hacker.'' But the addiction to the computer, which one law officer called ``an umbilical cord,'' remained.

He felt persecuted, said his friend Emmanuel Goldstein, a self- professed hacker who was convicted in 1984. When Goldstein talked to Mitnick two days ago, the world- famous hacker quipped to his friend, ``Why don't they blame me for world hunger as well?''

Goldstein, 35, now editor of 2600 Magazine, a quarterly for hackers, says he is not convinced that Mitnick is guilty of anything more than curiosity. ``If you think you can beat the system, you have to beat it. You can't just stifle these urges to do this.

``He's charged with what he could do with his knowledge, not what he's actually done,'' Goldstein said. ``Stealing implies taking something and leaving nothing. If he's just copying something he's not stealing.''

Hafner, co-author of ``Cyberpunk'' and now a reporter at Newsweek, said Mitnick was a person who loved technology.

``Kevin really wanted to be part of the system but no one would let him. He has a real dark side. He has this side that's alienated, slightly pathological in his behavior. He seems big and lumbering and not so on top of things, but he's extremely clever and really determined.''

Donn Parker, a senior management consultant at SRI International in Menlo Park, tracked Mitnick's action since he was 14, he said. Mitnick stole a year's worth of electronic mail from Parker in the 1980s. Occasionally, he would call for advice.

``He wanted to make a career of consulting on computer security,'' Parker said. ``I told him to go back to school and when he got a degree in computer science and completely removed himself from hacker culture and hacker activities to give me a call.''

``He had juvenile thoughts that if he did enough outrageous things he would become famous and could make a career out of hacking and computer security without having to go to school to earn it. And then later in his activities he became more dependent on hacking because it was the only life he ever knew,'' Parker said.

DAY: FRIDAY

DATE: 2/17/95

PAGE: A1

© 2/17/95 , San Francisco Chronicle, All Rights Reserved, All Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited