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KINGPIN

“We want to know who this guy Iceman is,” one of them said.

“Who’s Iceman?” Giannone answered innocently.

The situation was serious, the agents said; they’d learned that Iceman had threatened to kill the president. Giannone asked for his lawyer, and the agents phoned him on the spot. The attorney consented to an interview in the hope of winning leniency for his client at sentencing.

In a series of meetings over the next three weeks, the agents pulled Giannone out of jail again and again, shuttling him to the same field office where Gollumfun had orchestrated his downfall. Unlike most carders, Giannone had held his mud at his arrest and taken a chance on a trial instead of cutting a snitch deal. But now he was looking down the barrel of a five-year sentence. He was only twenty-one years old.

Giannone told them everything he knew: Iceman lived in San Francisco, did a brisk business in dumps, sometimes used the aliases Digits and Generous to sell his goods. He used hacked Wi-Fi to cover his tracks. A Mongolian woman called Tea was his Russian translator.

Most crucially, he had a partner named Christopher Aragon in Orange County, California. You want Iceman? Get Chris Aragon.

The revelations electrified the agents tracking Iceman. When Keith Mularski typed Chris Aragon’s name into the FBI’s case management system, he found Werner Janer’s 2006 proffer sessions, in which he’d named Chris’s dumps supplier as a tall, ponytailed man he knew as “Max the Hacker.” It got better. Way back in December 2005, Jeff Norminton had been arrested for receiving Janer’s wire transfer on behalf of Aragon. He’d told the FBI about introducing Aragon to the superhacker Max Butler after his release from Taft. The interviewing agent was only interested in real estate fraud and hadn’t pursued the lead.

Now Mularski and his Secret Service counterparts had a name. Giannone’s statements confirmed it. Iceman had told Giannone that he was