📸 Photo

CHRIS ARAGON

convention in New Orleans, he met Clara Shao Yen Lee, a stylish woman of Chinese descent who'd emigrated from Brazil. Taken by Clara's beauty and intelligence, he promptly married her.

Under Chris's leadership, Mission Pacific built a reputation as an innovative leasing broker, one of the first to offer instant contracts through the Web, which helped the firm gain tens of thousands of clients around the country. The former bank robber and drug smuggler had two prominent Orange County businessmen as partners and twenty-one employees working in a spacious office a block from the Pacific Coast Highway. Clara dropped in periodically to help out with the look and feel of the company's website and marketing material. By 2000, the couple had an upscale condo in Newport Beach, a son, and had staked a claim in a business that seemed as limitless in its potential as the Internet itself.

That spring, the dream died; the dot-com bubble burst, and the torrent of new companies that had been Mission Pacific's lifeblood started to dry up. Then larger companies like American Express entered the leasing arena, squeezing out smaller firms. Chris's company was one of dozens of leasing brokers to crash and burn. He began shedding employees and finally had to tell the stragglers that Mission Pacific wouldn't be able to cut their next payroll checks.

Chris went to work for another leasing company but was cut in a round of layoffs when a large bank acquired the firm. Meanwhile, his wife gave birth to a second boy. So when Jeff Norminton showed up talking about the superhacker he'd met in Taft, Chris was ready to listen.

By the time he and Max met in that North Beach restaurant, Chris had already been funding Norminton's scheme, providing some of the specialized equipment Norminton said his hacker needed. Now that Chris had met Max in person, he was eager for a demonstration. After talking for hours, the three of them left the coffee shop to find someplace to hack from.

They wound up at the twenty-seven-story Holiday Inn in Chinatown,