📸 Photo

18
The Briefing

In a briefing room near Washington, two dozen male faces filled a computer monitor on the wall, some scowling for a mugshot, others smiling for a passport photo. A couple of them looked like teenagers barely out of puberty; others were older, unkempt and vaguely dangerous in appearance.

Around the table a handful of FBI agents in suits and ties stared back at the faces of the international computer underground. For one of the agents, a lot of things were suddenly making sense.

At thirty-five years old, J. Keith Mularski had been an FBI agent for seven years. But he'd been on the computer crime beat for just four months, and he had a lot to learn. Enthusiastically friendly and quick to laugh, Mularski had wanted to be an FBI agent since his freshman year at Pennsylvania's Westminster College, when a bureau recruiter came in to speak to one of his classes. He'd held on to the list of qualifications even as he walked a more pedestrian career path, starting as a furniture salesman in Pittsburgh, then working his way up to a position as operations manager for a national furniture chain with fifty employees reporting to him at four stores.

In 1997, after eight years of waiting, he finally decided he was ready for the FBI. After a yearlong application process and sixteen weeks of