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KINGPIN

diatribes, laundry lists of grievances against Chris or various members of the carding community.

It was jealousy, Giannone figured. While he and Chris were partying in Vegas and the OC, Iceman was locked in his apartment, working like a dog. Indeed, the hacker’s outbursts often coincided with one of Giannone’s California sojourns. In June 2005, Iceman picked a fight as Giannone boarded an early morning flight to Orange County—Iceman was taking him to task for some oversight in one of their joint operations. The first message hit Giannone’s BlackBerry at six a.m.—three in the morning San Francisco time—and the texts continued nonstop for 2,500 miles before Iceman finally fell silent as the plane landed. When Giannone checked his e-mail later, he found dozens of apologetic letters from the hacker. “Sorry, I apologize. I was bugging out.”

On an earlier occasion, in September 2004, Giannone told Iceman he was about to fly out to visit Chris, and Max remarked cryptically that he could prevent the trip if he wanted to. Giannone laughed. But an hour and a half into his flight, the plane suddenly turned around and headed for Chicago. As the airliner set down at O’Hare, the captain explained that the Los Angeles air traffic control center had gone dark, necessitating the change in itinerary.

It turned out a computer error was responsible. There was a known bug in the Windows-based radio control system at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale, which required technicians to reboot the machine every 49.7 days. They’d missed a reboot, and a backup system had failed at the same time. The outage resulted in hundreds of flights being grounded and five incidents of airplanes drifting closer to each other than safety regulations permit. No foul play was discovered, but years later, when the full range of Max Vision’s powers became clear, Giannone would find himself wondering if Iceman hadn’t cracked the FAA’s computers and crippled Los Angeles, just to stop him from going clubbing with Chris.