They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. 'Deal me out, baby.I'm a normal.' This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself.

'There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that.' This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. Even though readers may not exonerate Butler for swindling so many for so long, Poulsen makes them care enough about him to wonder why he kept doing it. While the author avoids alienating readers who don’t know their bits from their bytes, he also provides enough jargon for technophiles. In this complex story full of multifaceted machinations both mortal and machine, Wired editor Poulsen successfully sifts through Butler’s many sordid capers. He tried for a while, even becoming a “white hat” cyber-security consultant, but something about the black-market world of online thievery always called him back. Alas, that’s something Butler found harder to do than cracking computer codes. All he had to do was play it straight and use his incredible programming prowess for good instead of evil.

An incredibly gifted computer geek, he caught the gathering cyber wave-and could have ridden it all the way to untold riches.

How he got there and how the authorities finally managed to topple him is a harrowing tale shot through with technology and tragedy.īutler was a just another American outcast working in Boise, Idaho in the late 1980s when the Internet began to take off. Max “Vision” Butler-currently in a federal penitentiary-once sat atop a billion-dollar criminal empire trafficking in stolen credit-card numbers.

Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen