After Patty and I parted ways at Kennedy Airport, I called my ex-wife Donna, who lived less than ten minutes away from the airport, and told her I was in New York. I asked her if I could stay there for a day or two.

After our divorce over a year earlier, Donna and I didn't talk for a few weeks. She was very bitter. But eventually, little by little, we started talking to each other again, and remained close friends. We talked on the phone a lot, and I visited her in Brooklyn every so often. 

We used to have four dogs together. I traveled too much to take care of them properly, so they stayed with Donna. They were like our children, so I was always happy to see them when I was in Brooklyn.

Donna and I didn't have sex anymore, but we had been family for so long, she was always going to be my family, no matter what some paper says. She was like a sister to me now.

After my crazy two weeks with Patty, I really wanted to tell Donna what happened. But I couldn't. I never told her anything about my personal life, or other females, because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. As far as she was concerned, I was celibate.

The next day I ended whatever relationship Patty thought we had. I took the coward's way out and texted her: "Hey, I had a good time. But I'm still in love with Alice, so I'm gonna go back with her. I hope u understand."

Short and to the point. 

Patty's reply was surprisingly civil: "I understand. U gotta follow ur heart."

But then half an hour later I got another text from her. A little snippier. Then I got another text from her. And another. And another. Each text was nastier than the one before. Sooner or later I started replying in the same mean tone.

By the end of the day we were sending each other hateful tirades.

While Patty was staying with me in Florida, I had come clean about Alice. So now Patty knew exactly which buttons to press to get under my skin: "Ur dating an addict? Ur so stupid! They never get clean! She doesn't love u. She's just using u! All she wants is money for drugs. She'll never quit heroin!"

And I knew exactly which buttons to press to get under her skin: "WTF is wrong w u? Sex 5 times a day? I felt like u were raping me! And that shit in the car? Sick! And u give the worst blowjobs ever!"

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Remember pimple poppin' Patty, the drug counselor?

At this point I hadn't talked to Patty in over a year, ever since right after my divorce, back when I had hung out with her three or four times at the mansion in the Poconos, and she had made meatballs with tomato sauce from scratch. 

After that I had met Jennifer, the gorgeous, impossibly perfect gold digger. Then Linda, the scam artist who was immune to abortions. And then Liz, the yoga pothead who moved to North Carolina. And Raven, the airheaded wannabe porn star. And finally, Alice, the heroin addicted hooker. 

What a team, what a team! What an all-star team!

Now, a year later, while I was living in the apartment in Middletown and going through all this crazy turmoil with Alice, I suddenly got a call from Patty out of nowhere:

"Hey Oliver! Remember me? It's Patty. It's been a while. How have you been? I'm still thinking about you all the time. Listen, can I ask you a favor? Can I come stay with you?"

"Uhmm, wait, what? You want to come stay with me?" I asked.

"Yeah, things are crazy here. I need to get outta Scranton for a while. Disappear off the radar. Get away from the paparazzi."

"Paparazzi? What paparazzi? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Well, remember when we met last year and you took me out to dinner at that steakhouse in Milford?"

"Yeah?"

"Remember I told you I had been there before, because before I met you, I dated a musician who lived near you in Milford?"

"Yeahhh?"

"He was actually a really famous musician. You might know him."

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Alice told me she wanted to come with me, but that she would need $100 worth of dope for every day we were away from her drug dealer.

Each bag of heroin cost $10. She needed to shoot up at least 3 bags at a time, 3 times a day. That's 9 bags a day. The 10^th bag was kind of a bonus.

She said without $100 of heroin a day, she'd get terribly dope sick and the whole trip would be ruined. We were going to be in Hawaii for 10 days, so she needed to pack $1000 worth of her medicine.

Yeah, she seriously called it her medicine.

It didn't even occur to me that if I got caught at the airport with her, while she's smuggling $1000 worth of heroin on board, I would be going to prison for a long long time. I just wanted her to have a good time, and show her how nice life could be sober.

Don't ask me why showing her how nice sober life could be involved $1000 worth of heroin. It seemed to make sense at the time. Shut up.

When we arrived at the airport, she stuffed the heroin between her legs. It was a LOT of heroin, so she had a hard time walking. But we made it. The TSA officer at the metal detector even tried to flirt with her, while we were sweating bullets.

We had so much fun in Honolulu. We stayed at the Outrigger hotel, right on the beach. Every day was filled with fancy filet mignon dinners at nice restaurants, Broadway-like shows, a helicopter tour of the island, a submarine tour of the ocean floor, massages at the spa, shopping trips, etc. We even visited Dog The Bounty Hunter. 

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Alice didn't really talk to her mother anymore, but she talked to her grandma Gina in Tennessee a lot. When she told Gina she was afraid to go to Hawaii, Gina asked to talk to me. Alice gave her my number.

Gina called me and asked me about my intentions with Alice. I explained to her how I felt about her granddaughter, and that I wanted to show her a better life and convince her to get sober.

We talked for over two hours. She wanted to know more about me, so I told her about my alcoholic father and how he had been the perfect negative role model,  and that he made me want to be a better man than him, because I wanted to be nothing like him.

And I told her what it was like to be married to Donna. And about my experiences with the girls I had met before Alice. 

Gina could tell that I was not just some sleazy guy trying to get in her granddaughter's pants. She could tell I was sincere and that I genuinely cared about Alice. She understood that I didn't just see Alice as some drug addicted whore and I didn't just want to use her as my vacation sex toy. Gina loved me. 

She was a very religious woman and told me she believed God had sent me to save Alice's life. She literally called me an angel sent by God. I was flattered, but it also made me feel pretty awkward.

I was honest with her and told her I'm not religious at all. I told her I don't mind if other people believe in God and it enriches their lives. It just doesn't do anything for me.

The one thing I didn't tell her was that when I was a teenager, my hacker name used to be Lucifer. Gina probably would have flipped out and tried to perform an exorcism on me.

She couldn't understand why I don't believe in God. I guess she had never really met someone who didn't believe in something that was so fundamental in her own life.

I told her that I grew up in Northern Europe, and people over there are far less religious than Americans. To most Europeans, the Bible is really nothing more than a book of ancient fables, similar to Grimm's Fairy Tales.

To many Europeans, it's bizarre that so many Americans still believe in gods, devils, angels and demons. It's like Americans are stuck in the Dark Ages.

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While hanging out with Liz, and then later with Raven, I became more and more involved in buying and selling real estate online.

Making web pages for each property was a tedious, time consuming task that required a lot of concentration, because if you accidentally type the wrong tax map number, you're buying or selling the wrong property.

I placed a job ad online to find someone who could help me out with making these real estate web pages. Alice was one of the people who applied for the job. She was 24 and almost as petite as Liz and she also had long dark hair. She looked a bit like a tiny version of Angelina Jolie. 

She had been the personal assistant of a real estate broker in the past. So she had some experience in this field. Perfect! However, since I do things my own way, I was going to have to explain quite a lot of stuff to her. It was a steep learning curve. But she was very smart and a quick learner.

I was buying and selling real estate like a realtor, without actually having a realtor's licence. You don't need one when you own the properties you buy and sell. You only need a license if you sell someone else's property. 

And I did my own closings, without hiring a lawyer. Normally people hire a lawyer to prepare the new deed. I did all the paperwork myself, because when I used to work at the newspaper in Brooklyn, I had seen that lawyers really just use the same template over and over again and then charge an arm and a leg for nothing. I saved about $1000 in legal fees every time I sold a property and prepared the deed myself.

So Alice had to learn how to be a web programmer, a graphic designer, a realtor, and a lawyer. And she pulled it off. 

Then, after a few weeks, I started to notice that she had a hard time concentrating. Suddenly she made a lot of mistakes or just stared at the screen and couldn't remember the next step.

By now we had spent so much time together that we were getting pretty close. We started having sex. Liz had been gone for a few months, and I really wasn't all that interested in Raven the airheaded wannabe porn star. Especially not after Alice and I started getting intimate.

More and more, I got the feeling that Alice was hiding something from me.

But I wasn't sure if I was just being paranoid. Who could blame me for being paranoid, after the crap I had been through with the last few girls I met?

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After the divorce, I moved into the mansion in the Poconos.

It was still not completed, but I explained to the building inspector that if he didn't issue a certificate of occupancy, I would lose a fortune in bank penalties, because the deadline for the construction loan had long expired.

Thankfully he agreed to let me live in the house even though it wasn't totally finished yet.

The house was way too big for just one person. When I walked around, I could hear the echo of my steps. The loneliness was soul-crushing.

I really missed Donna. I was so depressed, I spent hours just lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. I was so used to having her around me at all times, that now there was a big gaping hole in my life.

But at the same time, I felt at peace for the first time in... ever?

Finally I didn't have someone constantly telling me that no matter what I did, it was wrong. I didn't feel like I was constantly walking on eggshells, because if I said or did the wrong thing, someone would punish me with some psychotic tantrum.

That feeling of inner peace and serenity was nice. If only I had someone in my life to share it with. 

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Year after year, I told myself that I wasn't going to put up with her crazy bullshit anymore.

I told myself that the next time she had one of her totally pointless, unreasonable, uncalled-for tantrums, I would get a divorce.

But then the next time we had a huge fight, because she didn't want to go to the movies, or she accused me of purposely buying the wrong kind of peanut butter, or I supposedly fucked a whore in the backseat during the few minutes my phone had no signal, I always felt like I would be totally overreacting if I got a divorce because she didn't want to go to the movies.

That just sounded so silly: Why did you get divorce? Because my wife didn't want to go to the movies with me.

But I was really just making excuses, because getting a divorce and totally changing my life was scary. She had managed to drive away all my friends with her tantrums.

If she didn't want to go see a movie, I figured maybe I could go with my friend Kenny.

But she became insanely jealous even when I hung out with other guys. She acted like any time I did not totally focus all my attention on her, and I dared to speak to another human being, I was doing something wrong, and it had to be met with fierce vengeance. 

Even when I talked on the phone with my mother in Germany, Donna acted like my mother was "the other woman." She always accused me of conspiring against her with my mother somehow.

And she often asked me, if I had to choose between Donna and my mother, who would I pick?

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I used to draw cartoons all the time, even when I drove a cab at night.

But this job as production manager was so stressful, I had no energy left when I came home at night. There was no way I could be creative after work and come up with new cartoons.

For the first five years I had lived in the States, I did not even have a computer at home. Hacking is addicting, and now that I was over the age of 18, and I would be tried as an adult if I got caught, and law enforcement had finally caught up with hackers, I was scared to get in trouble again. Because I knew this time I would really go to jail.

The best way to avoid the temptation of doing something with a computer that I shouldn't be doing, was not to have one. But after five years of living in the States, and not having had any contact whatsoever with the hacking scene for that whole time, I figured I was ready to own a computer again. So while I was the production manager at the newspaper in Brooklyn, I finally bought a PC.

This was during the early days of the Internet revolution. My hacker friends and I had grown up on the Internet. To us it was an old hat. It was our home. But now finally the rest of the world realized that there was a virtual online world.

All these huge corporations wanted a piece of the pie and they all tried to figure out how to make money on the Internet. They knew there was money to be made, they just couldn't figure out how.

They spent billions of dollars on Internet start-ups that really had no business plan, and who were bleeding cash like crazy, instead of making a profit, until they all ended up crashing and burning. All these huge companies lost billions of dollars during the days of the Internet bubble.

Meanwhile I had been playing around with my new computer at home, and I figured out how to put my cartoons online, by building a very primitive little website. I hadn't drawn any new cartoons in months, but I put my old cartoons on the web. 

Up until then I had relied on sending my cartoons to publishing houses, hoping that an editor would pick some of my cartoons for a new book or the next issue of some tabloid.

And many did. I had a whole bunch of cartoons published in all kinds of magazines, and in over a dozen different books.

Some of my cartoons were even hanging in museums for cartoon art or modern art. I was making a name for myself as a cartoonist, just like I had made a name for myself as a hacker a few years earlier.

But as a freelance cartoonist, you never know how much money you are going to make next week or next month.

Some magazines, like the New Yorker, were paying $500 for a cartoon back then. Other papers, like the SUN supermarket tabloid with all the crazy headlines, only paid $5. 

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I landed a job in the graphic department of a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. At first I had to create the ads for local advertisers. The old lady who owned the newspaper liked my work, and after just a few weeks I was promoted to production manager. 

I was now in charge of the entire newspaper. I was the one who determined how many pages each issue had, how many copies to print, what the newspaper looked like, and where each article and advertisement went on each page.

It was another job I had gotten by pretending to know their software, even though I didn't. I had to learn everything on the fly, without letting anyone know that I had no idea what I was doing.

After a few weeks, I was pretty good at my job and had made several improvements to the paper.

Before I took over, the previous production manager still had cut and paste boards, where each page was literally being glued together with snippets of text on paper strips. And photos still had to be developed in a dark room.

Like we were a bunch of savages or something. 

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After a few weeks of pretending to be a freelance artist, I had to admit to myself that I wasn't actually making any money. I really shouldn't have quit my day job as art director at that newspaper. So I needed to find a new job. Not that easy.

Donna's brother's father-in-law Lou owned a limousine service. Well, that's what he called it, but it was really just a bunch of guys driving their own shitty cars. There were no actual limos. It was a typical New York ghetto cab service. 

There are two different types of taxis in New York City. The yellow cabs that everyone knows don't have radios, but the drivers are allowed to pick up people on the street. Limousines are not yellow, and the drivers have two way radios to communicate with a dispatcher, but they are not allowed to pick up people on the street.

Lou was always looking for drivers, so if I had a car, I could start working for him right away. But I didn't have a car.

Donna's uncle Rick had an old junk car rotting in his backyard. He said I could have it for free. He was probably happy to finally get rid of that wreck. The transmission was slipping, the seats were ripped, the ceiling in the car looked like it had cancer, and the body was so eaten up by rust, that there were holes in the floor in front of the backseat. 

People sitting on the backseat could look down and see the asphalt through the holes between their feet. It was an old red Dodge. Rick jokingly called it the Red Baron. I called it the Flintstone mobile, because I felt if I kick down hard enough, my feet would be on the street, and then I could use my feet to move the car, just like Fred Flintstone. 

As an added bonus, the muffler was broken. So the exhaust fumes were coming through the holes in the floor. The car was basically a rolling gas chamber. I inhaled so much carbon monoxide, I'm sure I lost quite a few brain cells, while driving around in that death trap. 

If I remember correctly, I was a New York cab driver for about two years. Maybe a little less. I drew cartoons during the day and drove at night, from 6 pm until 2 am.

A lot of crazy stuff happened during those two years. 

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Every time I flew to New York, I came with a tourist visa, which allowed me to stay in the US for three months each time. After those three months were up, I had to leave the country for at least one day, or I'd be an illegal immigrant.

After I completed my mandatory civil service in Germany, I had no reason to fly back anymore. But after I stayed with Donna for almost three months, my visa was about to expire, and if I got caught overstaying my legal welcome, I could be deported and banned from re-entering the States.

So something needed to be done. I figured the easiest thing would be, if I fly back to Germany for a few days and come right back. Then I'd have a fresh three month tourist visa.

But Donna was afraid I wouldn't come back, so she didn't want me to go. She told me if I fly back to Germany, for even just one day, it's over. 

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It took me a couple of days to digest the fact that the girl I had been talking to on the phone for a year wasn't who I thought she was, and she had been lying to me this whole time.

But then I remembered those three worst case scenarios I had contemplated earlier. Was the fact that she was 12 years older than me really worse than her being in a wheelchair or having cancer?

No, of course not.

Her age really didn't make any difference at all. She was still the same Donna I had been talking to for a year. She was still the same person who knew everything about me at this point, and who could always make me smile. 

At this point we still had not met in person yet, and now I understood why she had been hesitant about meeting. But now that her secret was out, I figured we finally needed to meet. I decided to surprise her.

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Even when I worked at the school for handicapped kids, I still talked to Donna for hours every day. I spent all my free time on the phone with her. Sometimes we talked until the sun came up and I went to work without having slept at all.

By now I had lost all interest in the illegal hacking scene, so Lucifer had retired. But I still continued to run my software company as Goliath and we had produced a few popular video games. Some of them were distributed by a German software company that later became part of Electronic Arts.

I was only 20, but I had already made a nice amount of money with those video games and I ended up flying to New York whenever I had a chance, to spend time with Donna. During one particular three month time period I ended up flying to New York six times. Sometimes just for a weekend. 

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Girls were rare in the hacking scene. I knew hundreds of guys in the scene, but there were only three or four girls.

Two of them were famous because they ran popular online boards. And of course they hated each other and had cat fights online.

Donna lived in New York, and her arch nemesis Tammy lived in California. Each one wanted to have the most important BBS, where the best crews uploaded their cracked games, or "warez" first.

Back then, having "zero day warez" (brand new cracked games that are not even one day old yet) on your BBS first was a big status symbol. The competition between the crews and the BBS they favored was fierce. Whoever had the most "first releases" (cracking and spreading a new game before anyone else) was considered the best or most elite crew. Being part of the hacker elite was everything back then.

Kids today think they sound cool when they spell everything wrong. That wasn't any different back then. The word elite for example was often spelled "leet" or "1337."

If a hacking crew associated with the BBS of one of those two girls to spread their first release warez, they weren't really welcome on the other girl's BBS.

Donna ran a very popular BBS that was frequented by many elite hackers from around the world. I decided to ask her to make her BBS in New York the exclusive headquarters for my European hacking crew, which meant we would upload all our warez on her BBS first. And then the leechers of other crews would have to come to her BBS to download our warez and upload them on other boards.

It also meant that the hackers who were loyal to Tammy's board in California were now automatically our enemies.

When I called Donna, we hit it off, and we ended up talking for hours. I started calling her every day.

Suddenly talking to her seemed so much more important to me than my hacking crew. I lost any interest in games, or whether my group was the most elite crew with the most first releases. All that seemed so stupid and unimportant all of a sudden.

The other guys in my crew started to notice that I had lost interest, and they began to call Donna my Yoko Ono. They felt Yoko was the reason why the Beatles broke up, and Donna was the reason why I lost interest in my crew. They were right.

My crew had gotten so big, with members in so many different countries, that the different cells of the crew didn't even know each other or talk to each other. For example, the Scottish musicians and graphic artists never talked to the German crackers, and the Swedish programmers never talked to the Swiss original suppliers.

I was the only link between all of them. I was the one who talked to everyone every day, and told everyone what needed to be done to work together as a team.

I would ask the programmer in one country to make a new cracktro, and then ask the graphic artist in another country to draw the logo, and ask the musician in yet another country to compose a tune, and ask the cracker in yet another country to use that cracktro in front of his latest release, and then ask the spreaders in yet another country to ensure that the crack was being spread around the world.

I was the backbone of the crew. Without me, nothing got done. So when I suddenly didn't call anyone in the crew anymore, and my line was always busy, because I was on the phone with Donna pretty much 24/7, things started to fall apart very quickly.

My crew was suddenly a body without a head. My crew fragmented and different splinter cells joined up with other crews. But I didn't care. Donna was all I cared about.

Donna and I had gotten so close, we literally never hung up the phone. There's a six hour time difference between New York and Germany, so when I got up in the morning to go to school, it was still the middle of the night in New York, and Donna was sleeping, but we were connected on the phone.

When I got home after school, we were still connected and it was time for her to wake up and we said good morning to each other.

The reason we never hung up and had a standing line was because at this time phreaking had become more and more difficult, because by now the phone network in the US was digital as well. It was getting harder and harder to get credit cards that lasted more than a day before they were shut down for abuse.

And blue boxing was getting harder too, because the phone companies experimented with filters that blocked the tone hackers played into the phone to get free lines.

It was an arms race between hackers and phone companies. Every time the phone companies made a change to stop blue boxing, hackers figured out the new frequencies and released new versions of their blue box software.

So rather than hanging up and risking that we may never be able to get another free international line again, Donna and I decided to simply stay connected all the time.

My parents started to wonder what I was doing in my room all the time, and who I kept talking to in English all day and night. They had every reason to be worried, because I had become so notorious as a hacker, that the German FBI had raided my parents' house twice.

The first time the FBI had actually been looking for me. But I got off with a warning, because I was still under age, and there really weren't any laws against cyber crime yet, because hackers were so far ahead of law enforcement in terms of computer knowledge.

A lot of the things hackers did back then were criminal but not technically illegal, because there were no laws against it yet.

After that raid, I decided to be extra careful, and moved all my equipment and software to a friend's house down the road. From that point on, there was nothing in my room, or anywhere else in my parents' house, that could get me in trouble. Well, except the fact that I was on the phone with America nonstop. But my parents didn't know that yet.

They were so pissed at me after the first raid, that they told me if I ever did anything illegal with computers again, they would kick me out and disown me.

But being a rockstar among hackers was addicting. I couldn't imagine my life just being a regular teenager, without having people all over the world know my name. So even though I promised my parents I stopped, I didn't.

After I moved all my stuff to my friend's house, I told my crew to spread the word that I, Goliath, had retired from the hacking scene and that I had opened a legitimate software company that was now going to produce video games. And that someone new, a hacker named Lucifer, was going to run my crew from now on.

But the truth was, that the new hacker with the name Lucifer didn't actually exist. It was still me, just using a different name, instead of my old name Goliath.

I liked the name Lucifer, not because I'm a satanist or devil worshipper, but because I thought it would be ironic, since the devil is also known as the Father of Lies or The Great Deceiver. And the existence of Lucifer the hacker was nothing more than a big lie.

After a little while, the new me, Lucifer, became just as famous as the old me, Goliath. Lucifer was the head of a hacking crew. Meanwhile Goliath was now the head of a software company.

There were a couple of official computer magazines that reviewed video games and occasionally mentioned the fact that there was an underground hacking scene.

And then there were several underground fanzines, or "scene mags" as we called them, produced by hackers. In those scene mags, hackers wrote about the scene and its celebrities. I was interviewed as Lucifer as well as Goliath a bunch of times.

I decided that producing my own scene mag would be a great way to promote my hacking crew with articles that were biased in my crew's favor.

Of course my scene mag wouldn't have any credibility, if people knew that I was just patting myself on the back. The praise for my hacking crew would sound a lot more legitimate, if it was written by a third party, who was not a member of my crew.

So I decided that it would be a good idea to let Goliath, who was retired from the hacking scene and officially had nothing to do with my hacking crew anymore, write the articles about my crew as an independent third person.

My scene mag ended up being one of my crew's greatest promotional tools.

I liked to blaze a new trail, off the beaten path, instead of following in someone else's footsteps. I always tried to dream up new ways of doing things that nobody else had thought of yet. Or come up with some new creative idea that would wow everyone.

By now I had recruited so many excellent members into my crew, that every one of them was better at their job than I was. Except creative thinking. That was my specialty. I was the guy with the ideas, and then I asked one of my crew members to turn my idea into reality.

While thinking about the easiest and cheapest way to produce and distribute a scene mag, I decided to create the magazine as a software file, not on paper. It was the first time ever that a scene mag had been produced in a digital format.

Later that idea became so popular that almost every other crew decided to produce a scene mag in digital form as well. There were hundreds of copycats trying to imitate my success.

But my digital scene mag wasn't just popular because it was the first. I had a natural knack for self-promotion and guerrilla marketing. I tried to come up with the catchiest title I could, so I ended up with the name "Sex and Crime."

Come on, admit it, the headline of this chapter made you curious, didn't it?

Well, back then, when I called my scene mag Sex and Crime, it had the same effect. It had nothing at all to do with sex, but I knew everyone would be curious to read it.

And let's be honest, you really don't give a crap about all the hacking stuff I'm talking about right now. The first chapter about prostitution caught your interest, and now you're trudging through this chapter, hoping I'll get back to the juicy stuff soon.

Don't worry, there's enough sex in this book to make a crackwhore blush. But I have to explain some stuff about my background first, or the rest of the book won't make any sense. So bear with me.

Anyway, I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene.

Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped.

I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag.

Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.

The more popular Sex and Crime became, the more powerful of a promotional tool for my hacking crew it became. At the height of its popularity, about half a million sceners around the world were reading my scene mag every month.

Germany's largest magazine publishing house ended up distributing Sex and Crime as a bonus on the floppy disk that accompanied their monthly computer magazine. So my mag ended up being sold on every newsstand, and I was actually getting paid to write about the scene and promote the shit out of my hacking crew. Sweet!

But of course I also wrote about other things besides my crew. At that time a bunch of right-wing skinhead extremists had discovered that the online hacking scene was a great medium to spread their verbal diarrhea. I wrote an article in Sex and Crime against those skinheads and their racist message.

A computer show on German TV noticed my article and invited me to be a guest on their show and have a debate about racism with a skinhead.

I was excited that they asked me to be on TV, but I was too shy to actually go. And I figured, even if I win the televised debate with the skinhead, his bonehead buddies would just beat me up in the parking lot after the show.

Anyway, I lived a double life as Goliath and Lucifer for several years. I did whatever I could to not get in trouble with the law again, without actually stopping what I was doing in the hacking scene. So I fully committed to the story of there being two different people.

I had two different PO boxes, one for Goliath and one for Lucifer. I even had two different handwriting styles. Whenever I mailed out a floppy disk with cracked games as Lucifer, the hand writing looked completely different than the hand writing I used when I mailed out a disk with the latest issue of Sex and Crime as Goliath.

Under the name Lucifer I was not only the leader of my hacking crew, but also the first mega-swapper. Conventional swappers had about 15 or 20 contacts in other crews with whom they exchanged floppy disks to spread their crew's warez. I took it to the extreme. Every time my crew released a new game, I mailed out floppy disks to about 200 different people.

If I remember correctly, proper postage for an oversized envelope containing a floppy disk cost about $1.70 back then.

Most other swappers re-used their stamps over and over again to save money. They shellacked their stamps with a coat of clear glue. Once the glue dried, you couldn't see it anymore, but when the post office cancelled the stamp, their ink didn't stick to it.

So the receiving swapper could take the stamp off the envelope, wipe the ink off, and then use the same stamp on the return envelope. The same stamps were being reused over and over again.

To me that seemed way too risky, because they were clearly defrauding the postal service. So I came up with a different trick: Instead of putting the proper $1.70 postage on each envelope, I only put a one cent stamp on it.

The German postal service delivered my packages to my contacts around the world anyway, but calculated the missing postage and charged the recipient $1.69 plus a steep penalty.

Even though people were happy to get disks from me with the latest games, they were pissed that they had to pay a few bucks every time they got one of my packages.

Then I figured out that if I sent out a massive amount of packages all at once, the clerk in the local post office who is supposed to calculate the missing postage for each package would be overwhelmed and simply forward the packages through the system without doing all that tedious math. It worked! That's why I mailed out 200 packages at a time, instead of the usual 15 or 20.

After a while, the post office realized that what I was doing was intentional, and that I was defrauding the post office by overwhelming them with hundreds of packages with improper postage on purpose every few days. Suddenly the postal police was on my trail.

Luckily my uncle just so happened to be working for the main post office in Aachen, and he was in charge of the PO box department. So when the postal police investigated who owned Lucifer's PO box, which was the return address on all those packages with insufficient postage, the warrant landed on my uncle's desk.

Back then PO boxes in Germany were free and anonymous, similar to Swiss bank accounts. All you had to do was ask a clerk for a box number, and he handed you a little pink card with a PLK number on it. Then people could send mail to that PLK number, and you could go pick up your mail at the post office by showing the clerk the little pink card.

My uncle knew that I had something to do with computers and that I received a lot of packages with disks from people around the world every day. But he didn't know any details.

He called me and asked me if I knew someone named Lucifer, and if I did, to tell him to stop that 1 cent stamp nonsense or face jail time, because the postal police was watching Lucifer's PO box.

I had no choice but to abandon that PO box and rip up my pink card. That was the end of my career as mega-swapper. But I continued to hang out on my crew's online headquarter every day.

I realized that the police was circling closer and closer around me and that I had to be even more careful about my double life from now on.

I even went so far as to ask one of my school friends to come to copy parties with me, to pretend to be Lucifer, so that people saw Lucifer and Goliath at the same place at the same time, and nobody would get the idea that it was really just me using two different names.

All the other members in my crew knew the truth, but they kept their mouths shut and didn't reveal it to anyone else outside of our crew. They understood the necessity of my lie to avoid arrest.

A few months later, the German FBI suddenly raided my parents' house a second time anyway. But this time they weren't even looking for me, neither under my new name Lucifer nor under my old name Goliath.

They had been looking for a different hacker, who called himself Pentagon. Someone had Pentagon's name in his little black contact book, and had accidentally written my address under Pentagon's name. So the FBI came to my house, looking for someone else.

Luckily there was nothing incriminating in my room, but my parents totally freaked out on me anyway.

From that point on I was really on thin ice with them. And they started to become more and more suspicious about me locking myself in my room and being on the phone all the time.

They even thought I might be on drugs and had a little intervention on one of the rare occasions they happened to catch me outside of my room in the hallway.

Then at some point they finally caught on to the fact that I was connected to America 24/7 and they went ape shit! They did the math, and it turned out that within just a few months, I had spent enough time on international calls, that if I got caught, they would have to pay over a million dollars in phone charges.

This was before cell phones. Everyone still used regular landlines, and the phone in my room was on their account. So they locked my phone. I could still receive calls, but I couldn't make calls, because the dial pad was locked.

Then I figured out that I could still dial numbers, if I took the receiver off the phone and tapped on the little contact button the receiver rested on, when you aren't using the phone.

If I had to dial a 3, I had to quickly tap that button three times. If I had to dial a 9, I had to quickly tap it nine times.

It was incredibly tedious, especially for long international phone numbers, because if I miscounted, I had to hang up and start all over again. It was such a pain in the ass!

Eventually my parents realized that despite the lock they put on my phone, I was still able to make phone calls somehow. So they took my phone away altogether.

That made my long distance relationship with Donna all the more difficult. Since I couldn't call her from the house anymore, I recorded the blue box tone on a tape and then I went to public phone booths and held up my walkman to the phone and played the tone that gave me a free international line to call Donna in New York.

I spent hours in phone booths every day. Winter came and it was freezing. I ended up catching pneumonia.

By then I had graduated from school and was now working in a school for mentally handicapped kids. Back then they still had a military draft in Germany, and every male over 18 had to join the army for a year.

I have always had a problem with authority. The idea that some knuckle-dragging sergeant, with half my IQ, was going to boss me around didn't sit too well with me.

I figured as soon as someone tells me to crawl through the mud, I'm gonna tell them to go fuck themselves, and then I'll spent a year in some army jail cell. Not my idea of fun.

So I became a conscientious objector. If you refuse to join the army on moral grounds, you have to give them a good reason why you are against killing someone on command. You could either go to an oral interview and try to convince the panel that you're not army material, or you could write an essay.

The interview basically consists of a bunch of trick questions:

Imagine you walk through the woods with your girlfriend, and suddenly a guy tries to rob you and kill her. You have a gun. Do you shoot the guy to save your girlfriend's life?

If you say no, they tell you you're lying, because of course you would do anything to save her life.

If you say yes, they tell you, "see, you would fire a gun and kill someone if necessary, so you are fit to join the army."

There is no right answer for these types of questions.

I figured the essay would be easier. It worked. I didn't have to join the army for a year, and I got to work with handicapped kids for a year and a half instead.

They made the civilian service longer, so that it deters people from taking "the easy way out" of their military service.

I enjoyed working with those kids and I even planned on going to college to become a special ed teacher and work with handicapped kids for a living.

I moved to the States for love. I had met a girl over the Internet. This was in the 1990s, before the Internet was widely used by the public.

As a teenager, I used to be a computer geek, when not everyone had a computer yet. I was a hacker. If you've ever seen the movie War Games, you get the idea. We used unbelievably slow dial-up modems and 8-bit computers. It was the stone age of the PC revolution.

My friends and I didn't hack into government computers to start World War 3 though. We didn't even hack into bank computers to steal millions. All we did was play video games, before playing video games became mainstream.

And if the games had copy protection, we removed the protection so we could copy the games for our friends. That was called "cracking" a game. We felt like the Robin Hoods among computer geeks, because we "stole" from the rich software companies and gave to the poor kids who couldn't afford to buy games.

There was an active hacking/cracking scene in Europe, America and Australia, and hackers/crackers or "sceners" from all over the world met at gatherings that were called copy parties.

I never liked to be a follower. I didn't want to be a member of someone else's crew, so I started my own cracking group. It didn't matter to me if my group wasn't going to be the biggest or the best, as long as it was my own. Why be a follower when you can be a leader?

At first I only gave floppy disks with my cracked games to my friends in my own class at school. Soon kids in other classes got my games from their friends. It didn't take long until I was known among kids at other schools in my hometown, the ancient Roman city of Aachen.

After a few months, my class went on a school trip to Trier, another old Roman city, a few hundred miles away from Aachen. We were supposed to go explore the ancient downtown area on our own, without adult supervision.

But it was raining, so I decided to hang out in the computer section of a department store instead. I played some of the video games I had cracked, and caught the attention of some local kids.

Cracking groups back then used to put their own little intro or cracktro in front of a cracked game. It's similar to the 20th Century Fox or Universal logo you see at the beginning of a movie. That was our way of getting famous. Cracktros with our crew's name were basically high tech graffiti.

Every time someone played a game we cracked, they had to look at our name first. That's really what it was all about. Not money. Just fame. Kinda like kids who spray graffiti on walls all over town, to spread their name.

Anyway, the local kids in that department store recognized my hacking crew's name in front of the games I was playing.

That was the first time I realized that I was getting famous in the hacking scene. People in cities hundreds of miles away knew my name. It was a pretty amazing feeling. As I found out later, it was addicting.

At that department store in Trier, I ended up recruiting one of those local kids into my group that day, because he turned out to be an excellent programmer.

As time went by, my crew grew larger. At first I had only recruited some of my classmates at school. But now we had grown so much, that we had members all over Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia and America.

Everyone in the hacking scene knew us. We were at the very top of the game. Our cocky slogan was "Europe's #1." That didn't sit too well with some competing hacking crews. There was constant bickering between the various crews about who was the best.

A bit like the East Coast – West Coast war in the hip hop scene. The more successful you were, the more haters talked trash about you. And we had a lot of haters. But our fans far outnumbered our enemies.

Going to copy party gatherings was an amazing feeling. Everyone knew me and my crew. Everyone wanted to shake my hand or talk to me. I felt like a rockstar. I was literally world-famous. Among sceners anyway.

In order to spread our cracks to as many people as possible, cracking crews used online bulletin board systems, or BBS for short. They were the precursors to Internet websites.

Each crew had members that specialized in different aspects of hacking. Almost like different members in a drug gang have different jobs. Some cook the drug, some stand guard, some sell the product on the streets.

In cracking crews back then, original suppliers provided the games through their connections at game stores or software companies. Crackers removed the copy protection from the games. Swappers exchanged floppy disks with the swappers of other crews. Spreaders uploaded the games to an online BBS to distribute the games as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. And leechers downloaded the latest cracks from other crews' BBS.

But in order to connect to a BBS, our computers had to make calls over regular phone lines. And long distance calls were still very expensive back then. There were no unlimited calling plans yet. International calls were virtually unaffordable.

So every elite crew had members called phreakers. They were the ones who provided the means to make free international phone calls to connect to a BBS on the other side of the globe.

The real world needs oil to move wares around. The hacking scene back then needed ways to make free phone calls to move digital warez around.

Usually phreakers got credit cards and passed them on to the spreaders, so they could use the cards to make expensive phone calls for free, to upload the latest cracked games to a bunch of boards online.

Phreakers had several different ways to get their hands on credit cards. The most popular way was phishing. Basically the phreakers called a bunch of random numbers and tried to convince the people on the other end that they were talking to an employee of the fraud department of their credit card company.

If the phreaker was good at his game, the person on the other end would give him all their personal information, their credit card, social security number, date of birth, etc.

It's amazing how gullible people are when you use the right inflection in your voice. Random strangers will trust you very quickly, if you speak to them calmly, quietly, and with confidence.

If you saw the movie Identity Thief, you get the idea. Melissa McCarthy plays a phreaker who phishes Jason Bateman's identity, by convincing him that she works for the fraud department of his credit card.

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, once said: "A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things."

A good hacker is a master manipulator. Some hackers are good at manipulating computer systems, others are good at manipulating brains.

Nowadays identity theft is a billion dollar industry. Even organized crime, like the Russian mob, employ phreakers to steal credit cards and then the mob uses these cards to make online purchases. There is a black market online, where hackers buy and sell people's information.

But back then, we weren't interested in making online purchases or selling people's ID to the mob. Crews back then just used the credit cards to make free phone calls around the world to spread their cracked games.

The phone system in Europe was more advanced than the American phone system. Countries like Germany had switched to an all digital phone network long before the US did. And on digital lines, it was much easier for the authorities to find and trace hackers who abused credit cards to make calls.

So European hackers called the free 800 numbers of American phone companies, and from those American lines called back to European lines with stolen credit cards. The American phone lines were still analog, and didn't allow the companies to trace the calls back. So European hackers became invisible by rerouting all their calls through America.

But then at some point the US phone companies finally switched over to a digital network as well, and suddenly phreaking became a lot more dangerous. Hackers started getting arrested left and right.

So more and more crews relied on a different way to make free phone calls, called "blue boxing."

Instead of using someone else's credit card, hackers played a tone into the phone that had the exact same frequency as the tone the phone companies used to release a line for a free phone call.

So, simply by playing that tone, you could suddenly make a free phone call to China or Europe.

A phreaker who called himself Captain Crunch had discovered by accident, that the toy whistle that came in Captain Crunch cereal boxes played exactly the right tone at exactly the right frequency to get a free phone line.

He became a legend in the hacking scene.

Prostitution is legal pretty much everywhere in the world. Well, almost everywhere. Not here in the US. When I was younger, I never understood why it should be illegal. I understand it now.

I grew up in Germany. Europe is far more liberal than America. Even most conservative right-wing parties over there are to the left of the US Democrats on many issues.

For example, it wouldn't occur to even the most right-wing party in Europe to oppose universal healthcare.

But this isn't a book about politics. It's about sex and drugs. You know, the good stuff.

So, I grew up in a pretty liberal society, where prostitution is legal. Every city has a designated red-light district, where brothels do their business. But you won't find brothels just in the red-light districts. You'll find them in all sorts of neighborhoods, tucked between supermarkets and single family homes.

They're not even hiding. Why would they? They're legal, and a normal part of society. You can quickly recognize them by the red lights they usually have in their windows. Or the big neon signs that say SEX CLUB or something to that effect.

The red-light district in Amsterdam is so famous, it's a popular tourist destination. You'll see whole families walk through the streets, pushing strollers with their toddlers, looking at the attractions. Entire bus-loads of Japanese tourists walk through those streets along the canals.

Most people don't know that Amsterdam has more canals than Venice. When you walk along those canals through the red-light district, you'll see half-naked girls from all over the world sit in large windows, as if they were store merchandise on display.

You can walk right up to them and ask them through the open window to show you the goods. They'll often pull their tops down with a fake smile and let you see their breasts. It helps them negotiate a good price. Often in broken English. Or they'll lift their short skirt and pull their panties aside. It's hard to argue over money when a girl flashes you her pussy.

The economic crisis didn't spare the red-light district in Amsterdam, and the girls in those windows will fuck you for bargain prices. There's an actual price war going on. Girls will underbid each other for a chance to have sex with you. Sounds like paradise for a horny guy, right?

So why aren't the streets in the red-light districts overrun by men looking to get laid? Because Europeans self-censor.

For example, in Germany, people will agree in theory that prostitution should be legal, but they usually won't admit that they themselves have ever gone to a prostitute: "Yeah, it should be legal, and I have no problem with it, but I would never go to one. I'm above that."

Then they secretly go to one anyway. On the down low. They won't admit it in polite company, because they don't want to look trashy.

Prostitution is not exactly a reputable business over there either, even though the girls actually have to pay taxes on their earnings, and submit to regular health check ups. Even the prostitutes have universal healthcare over there.

The benefit of legal prostitution is obvious: tax income for the city, healthier girls, and safety. In Amsterdam, each girl has an alarm button next to her bed that she can press if one of her "customers" tries to rape or hurt her. The police will arrive within minutes and protect the girl from harm.

I saw a documentary about prostitution in Holland a few years ago, that said over there health insurance actually pays for monthly visits to a prostitute for the disabled, because they feel that sex is part of a healthy life, so unmarried disabled men have a right to have sex, even if it's with a paid prostitute.

Pretty bizarre, huh? Can you imagine a US health insurance company picking up the bill for your romp in the hay with a hooker?

Growing up in a liberal society like that, prostitution was never really an issue of debate for me. It was just there. The fact that it existed was a part of life, like gas stations or grocery stores. And it never occurred to me that there should be any reason to outlaw it.

If a girl wants to sell her body, so be it. None of my business. Don't athletes sell their bodies, too? People can do behind closed doors whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. And that was still my attitude when I moved to the States in my 20s.

When I heard that prostitution was illegal over here, I thought it was silly. Quaint. Lame.

Europeans often laugh about how prudish Americans are, when it comes to sex. In Europe, sexuality is a normal part of life.

Fancy antique art museums are full of nudity. And you'll see naked girls in every major newspaper. Germany's biggest newspaper, Bild, has a topless girl on the back page of every daily issue. Nobody thinks twice about it. Nobody finds it necessary to protect the children.

A naked breast is no more a threat to the well-being of a child than a naked hand or foot. So from a European point of view, American media censorship seems utterly ridiculous.

People all over the world laughed at America, when the FCC fined Jacket Jackson for her "wardrobe malfunction" and flashing her boob for a second during the Superbowl halftime show a few years ago.

A lot of bands make two different music videos for their latest songs. A censored version for American TV, and an uncensored version that includes nudity for European music stations.

The so-called Land of The Free doesn't seem so free anymore, when you realize that other countries have a lot more freedom.

In Europe, nobody will bleep you, if you want to say a "bad" word on TV. The idea that some self-righteous little old lady at the FCC gets to tell other people which words they may or may not use, seems like a pretty strange concept in the rest of the civilized world.

Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures.

The War on Drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American War on Words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock and sound cool.

But every word serves a purpose. It conveys an idea.

And the idea behind words like feces, stool, or poop is exactly the same as behind the word shit. They all conjure up the same mental image in your head.

So why are stool and poop "good" words, and shit is a "bad" word? Who decided that, and why am I bound by that decision?

Why do some people feel offended by the word shit, but not by the word poop?

Because some little old lady at the FCC decided that good citizens don't use the word shit, and suddenly using a word like shit or fuck becomes an act of civil disobedience.

Suddenly a little four-letter word has the power to shock.

If a guest host on Saturday Night Live disobeys the rules and uses the word fuck on the air, it's a big deal, and the morning shows talk about it for days. That's so silly.

If a German farmer is being interviewed on the news, because a severe storm ruined his crop, nobody would bleep him, and nobody would make a big deal of it, if he said: "That God damn storm ruined my fucking crop! FUCK MY LIFE!"

If he doesn't curse on the air, it's not because he's being censored, but because he chooses not to, because he doesn't want to sound like an ignorant brute.

Germans don't need someone telling them what they can and cannot say. They decide for themselves what is appropriate.

Medical studies have shown that cursing reduces levels of stress and pain. Repressing your anger is not healthy. It's much better to verbalize it, and let off steam.

Maybe all that repressed anger is the reason why there are so many serial killers in America.

And although Europeans have a much more relaxed attitude when it comes to sexuality, and they don't feel the need to protect children from "bad" words or "bad" images of harmless nudity, the levels of teen pregnancy are much lower over there than in America.

Telling American teenagers that words describing sex are off limits, makes sex a tempting forbidden fruit, and it only makes them think about it more.

Educating European teenagers about their own sexuality, and that it's a natural part of life, but teaching them to censor themselves, because it's important to get an education before you start a family, is obviously a much more effective way to reduce teen pregnancy.

Anyway, this is my book. I curse when I get really upset. Letting off steam that way makes me feel a little bit better.

I've been through a lot, but I have never had the urge to go postal. I thank fuck for that.

And whether I write that I had sex with a girl, or I fucked her, or we screwed, or we copulated, or had intercourse, or a romp in the hay, it all conjures up the same mental image.

This book contains a lot of "bad" words. So if you are easily offended, go fuck yourself.