Chapter 1
Kevin's Story
by Kevin Mitnick

Starting Out

My path was probably set early in life. I was a happy-go-lucky kid, but bored. After my father split when I was three, my mother worked as a waitress to support us. To see me then an only child being raised by a mother who put in long, harried days on a sometimes-erratic schedulewould have been to see a youngster on his own almost all his waking hours. I was my own babysitter.

Growing up in a San Fernando Valley community gave me the whole of Los Angeles to explore, and by the age of twelve I had discovered a way to travel free throughout the whole greater L.A. area. I realized one day while riding the bus that the security of the bus transfer I had purchased relied on the unusual pattern of the paper-punch that the drivers used to mark day, time and route on the transfer slips. A friendly driver, answering my carefully-planted question, told me where to buy that special type of punch.

The transfers are meant to let you change buses and continue a journey to your destination, but I worked out how to use them to travel anywhere I wanted to go for free. Obtaining blank transfers was a walk in the park: the trash bins at the bus terminals were always filled with only-partly-used books of transfers that the drivers tossed away at the end of their shifts. With a pad of blanks and the punch, I could mark my own transfers and travel anywhere that L.A. buses went. Before long, I had all but memorized the bus schedules of the entire system. This was an early example of my surprising memory for certain types of information; still, today I can remember phone numbers, passwords and other items as far back as my childhood.

Another personal interest that surfaced at an early age was my fascination with performing magic. Once I learned how a new trick worked, I would practice, practice, and practice until I mastered it. To an extent, it was through magic that I discovered the enjoyment in fooling people.

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