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to Irvine, California, to take a job as a network administrator. All that was left was to confirm which Secret Service agent was violating policy by accessing sensitive material on his PDA.

That’s where Gonzalez proved his worth again. Now that he was buddies with Cumbajohnny, Ethics hit up the Shadowcrew leader for an account on his much-touted VPN, figuring it would be a safer way to access T-Mobile.

Gonzalez happily obliged, and his Secret Service handlers got to watch as Ethics surfed to T-Mobile’s customer service website and logged in with the user name and password of New York agent Peter Cavicchia III, a veteran cybercrime officer who’d distinguished himself by busting a former AOL employee for stealing ninety-two million customer e-mail addresses to sell to spammers.

The leak had been found. Cavicchia would quietly retire a few months later, and Ethics was added to the list of Operation Firewall targets.

There was just one more threat to the investigation, and, bizarrely, it was coming from one of the FBI’s underground assets.

David Thomas was a lifelong scammer who’d discovered the crime forums in the Counterfeit Library days and soon became addicted to the high-speed deal making and criminal camaraderie. Now forty-four years old, El Mariachi, as he styled himself, was one of the most respected members in the carding community, assuming the role of mentor to younger scammers and dispensing advice on everything from identity theft to basic life lessons gleaned from decades on the fringe.

His experience, though, didn’t immunize him from the hazards of his profession. In October 2002, Thomas showed up in an office park in Issaquah, Washington, where he and his partner had rented a drop for one of CarderPlanet’s founders. They were hoping to claim $30,000 in Outpost.com merchandise ordered by the Ukrainian. Instead, they found local police waiting for them.