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KINGPIN

was, after all, just a state case. Chris had been caught red-handed at the W, too, and that time he walked away with probation.

But as the weeks passed with Chris still in jail, Max started to worry. He was noticing strange cars parked on his street—an animal control van aroused his suspicion so much he got out a flashlight to peer in the windows. Then a San Francisco FBI agent called him out of the blue to inquire about Max's long-dead arachNIDS database. Max decided to invest in a rope ladder; he kept it by the back window of the apartment he shared with Charity, in case he had to get out fast.

He'd pause every now and then to reflect on his freedom—here he was, enjoying life, hacking, while at that very moment Chris was in a jail cell in Orange County.

Max picked a random San Francisco criminal defense attorney from the yellow pages, walked into his office, and handed over a pile of cash; he wanted the lawyer to travel to Southern California to check on Chris and see if there was anything he could do. The attorney said he'd look into it, but Max never heard back from him.

It was then that Max finally learned about Giannone's bust from a news article about Brett Johnson's life as an informant. Max had lost track of Giannone, and for all his hacking, Max had never thought to run the names of his associates through the public federal court website. The news that Giannone had lost a criminal trial worried him.

"Of all the rat snitch piece of shit motherfuckers out there, Giannone is the closest to being able to finger me for the feds," he confided in a post to the private administrators' forum on Carders Market. "The little dipshit might actually be able to get the feds close to me."

Max uprooted from Fox Plaza, hiding his equipment at home until he was set up with a new sanctuary. On June 7, he picked up the keys at the Oakwood Geary, another corporate apartment building carved out of gleaming marble in the Tenderloin. He was "Daniel Chance" now, just another displaced software drone relocating to the Bay Area. The real