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KINGPIN

atop the Palms, where he'd blow $1,000 on dinner and another grand on wine. Back in Orange County, he took a mistress—an eighteen-year-old woman he met through one of his cashers.

Max found both drugs and marital infidelity distasteful. But what really irked him was the financial arrangement. Chris was paying Max haphazardly—in whatever amount he felt like turning over at any given moment. Max wanted a straight 50 percent of Chris's profits. He was certain that Chris was making serious bank from their joint operation.

Chris tried to set him straight, and he e-mailed Max a detailed spreadsheet showing where the profits were going. Out of a hundred cards, maybe fifty worked, and only half of those could buy anything worth selling—the others were seeds and stems, cards with $500 security limits that were good only for trifles like gas and meals. Chris had expenses, too—spreading his hustle meant flying his crew to far-flung cities, and airline seats weren't getting any cheaper. Meanwhile, he was paying rent at Villa Siena for his credit card factory.

Max was unconvinced. "Call me back when you're not stoned."

The last straw came when Chris, three months after the Half-Life raid, suffered a close call himself. He'd driven up to San Francisco to meet with Max and make some carding runs at Peninsula malls. He and his crew were checked into adjacent rooms at the W, a posh hotel in the Soma district, when Chris got a call from the front desk. His credit card had been declined.

Hungover and fuzzy-headed from the flu, Chris took the elevator to the marbled lobby and pulled a new fake card from his swollen wallet. He watched as the clerk swiped it. It was declined. He produced another one, and it failed too. The third one worked, but by then the clerk was suspicious, and as the elevator was carrying Chris back to the twenty-seventh floor, she was picking up the phone and calling the credit card company.

The next knock on Chris's door was the San Francisco Police Department. They cuffed him and searched his rooms and car, seizing his Sony laptop, an MSR206, and his SUV, which had a fake VIN tag—Chris had