Joe Engressia never wanted to screw Ma Bell. His dream had always been to
wor k for her.
The day I visited Joe in his small apartment on Union Avenue in Memphis,
he was upset about another setback in his application for a telephone job.
"They're stalling on it. I got a letter today telling me they'd have to
postpone the interview I requested again. My landlord read it for me. They
gave me some reunaround about wanting papers on my rehabilitation status but
I think there's something else going on."
When I switched on the 40-watt bulb in Joe's room--he sometimes forgets
whe n he has guests--it looked as if there was enought telephone hardware to
start a small phone company on his own.
There is one phone on top of his desk, one phone sitting in an open
drawer beneath the desk top. Next to the desk-top phone is a cigar-box-size
M-F devic e with big toggle switches, and next to that is some kind of
switching and coupling device with jacks and alligator plugs hanging loose.
Next to that is a Braille typewriter. On the floor next to the desk, lying
upside down like a dead tortoise, is the half-gutted body of an old black
standard phone. Across the room on a torn and dusty couch are two more
phones, one of them a touch-ton e model; two tape recorders; a heap of ph one
patches and cassettes, and a life- size toy telephone.
Our conversation is interrupted every ten minutes by phoen phreaks from
all over the country ringing Joe on just about every piece of equipment but
the toy phone and the Braille typewriter. One fourteen-year-old blind kid
from Connecticut calls up and tells Joe he's got a girl friend. Joe says
they'll talk later in the evening when they can be alone on the line. Joe
draws a deep breath, whistles him off the air with a n earsplitting
2600-cycle whistle. Joe is pleased to get the calls but he look ed worried
and preoccupied that evening, his brow constantly furrowed over his d
arkwandering eyes. In addition to the phone-company stall, he has just
larned that his apartment house is due to be demolished in sixty days for
urban rene wal. For all its shabbiness, the Union Avenue apartment has been
Joe's first h ome-of-his-own and he's worried that he may not find another
before this one is demolished.
But what really bothers Joe is that switchmen haven't been listening to
him . "I've been doing some checking on 800 numbers lately, and I've
discovered that certain 800 numbers in New Hampshire co uldn't be reached
from Missouri or Kansas. Now it may sound like a small thing, but I don't
like to see sloppy work; it makes me feel bad about the li nes. So I've been
calling up switching offices and reporting it, but they have n't corrected
it. I called them up for the third time today and instead of che cking they
just got mad. Well, that get s me mad. I mean, I do try to help them.
There's something about them I can't understand--you want to help them and
t hey just try to say you're defrauding them.
It is Sunday evening and Joe invites me to join him for dinner at a
Holiday Inn. Frequently on Sunday evening Joe takes some of his welfare
money, calls a cab, and treats himself to a steak dinn er at one of Mephis'
thirteen Holiday Inns. (Memphis is the headquarters of Holiday Inn.
Holiday Inns have been a favorite for Joe ever since he made h is first solo
phone trip to a Bell switching office in Jacksonville, Flori da, and stayed
in a Holiday Inn there. He likes to stay at Holiday Inns, he ex plains,
because tehy represent freedom t o him and because the rooms are arranged
the same all over the country so he know s that any Holiday Inn room is
familiar t erritory to him. Just like any telephone.)
Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restaurant of the Holiday Inn Medical Center
on Madison Avenue in Mephis, Joe tells me the highlights of his life as a
phone phreak.
At age seven, Joe learned his first phone trick. A mean baby-sitter,
tired of listening to little Joe play with th e phone as he always did,
constantly, pu t a lock on the phone dial. "I got so ma d. When there's a
phone sitting there and I can't use it...so I started getti ng mad and
banging the receiver up and down. I noticed I banged it once and i t dialed
one. Well, then I tried bangin g it twice...." In a few minutes Joe lea
rned how to dial by pressing the hook switch at the right time. "I was so
ex cited I remember going 'whoo whoo' and beat a box down on the floor."
At age eight, Joe learned about whistling. "I was listening to some
intercept nonworking number recording i n L.A.--I was calling L.A. as far
back a s that, but I'd mainly dial nonworking nu mbers because there was no
charge, and I'd listen to these recordings all day. Well, I was whistling
'cause listening these recordings can be boring after a while even if they
are from L.A. and all of the sudden, in the middle of whistli ng, the
recording clicked off. I fiddle d around whistling some more, and the sam
e thing happened. So I called up the switch room and said, "I'm Joe. I'm
ei ght years old and I want to know why I whistle this tune the line clicks
off.' He tried to expalin it to me, but it was a little too technical at
the time. I went on learning. That was a thing nobody was going to stop
me from doing. The phones were my life, and I was going to pay any price
to keep on larni ng. I kenw I could go to jail. But I had to do what I had
to do to keep on l earning."
The phone is ringing when we walk back into Joe's apartment on Union
Avenue . It is Captain Crunch. The Captain has been following me around by
phone, calling up everywhere I go with additio nal bits of advice and
explanation for m e and whatever phone phreak I happen to b e visiting. This
time the Captain reports he is calling form what he desc ribes as "my
hideaway high up in the Sierra Nevada." He pulses out lustly s alvos of M-F
and tells Joe he is about t o "go out and get a little action tonight . Do
some phreaking of another kind, if you know what I mean." Joe chuckles.
The Captain then tells me to make sure I understand that what he told me
about tying up the nation's phone lines was true, but htat he and the phone
phreaks he knew never used the techniqu e for sabotage. They only learnedthe technique to help the phone company.
"We do a lot of troubleshooting for them. Like this New
Hampshire/Missouri WATS-line flaw I've been screaming abou t. We help them
more than they know."
After we say good-bye to the Captain and Joe whistles him off the line,
Joe tells me about a disturbing dream he ha d the night before: "I had been
caught an they were taking me to a prision. I t was a long trip. They were
talking me to a prision a long long way away. And we stopped at a Holiday
Inn and it was my last night ever at a Holiday Inn, an d it was my last night
ever using the phone and I was crying and crying, and the lady at the
Holiday Inn said, 'Gosh, honey, you should never be sad at a Hol iday Inn.
You should always be happy here. Especially since it's your last night.'
And that just made it worse and I was sobbing so much I couldn't st and it."
Two weeks after I left Joe Engressia's apartment, phone-company security
agents and Memphis police broke into it . Armed with a warrant, which they
left pinned to the wall, they confiscated ev ery piece of equipment in the
room, including his toy telephone. Joe was p laced under arrest and taken
to the city jail where he was forced to spend the n ight since he had no
money and knew no one in Memphis to call.
It is not clear who told Joe what that night, but someone told him that
the phone company had an open-and-shut case against him because of
revelations of illegal activity he had made to a phone -company undercover
agent.
By the morning Joe had become convinced that the reporter from Esquire,
wit h whom he had spoken two weeks ago, was t he undercover agent. He
probably had ugly thoughts about someone he couldn't see gaining his
confidence, listening t o him talk about his personal obsessions and dreams,
while planning all the while to lock him up.
"I really though he was a reporter," Engressia told the Memphis Press-
Scimitar. "I told him everything...." Feeling betrayed, Joe proceeded to
confess everything to the press and police.
As it turns out, the phone company did use an undercover agent to trap
Joe, although it was not the Esquire reporte r.
Ironically, security agents were alerted and began to compile a case
agains t Joe because of one of his acts of love for the system: Joe had
called an internal service department to report t hat he had located a group
of defective long-distance trunks, and to complain a gain about the New
Hampshire/Missouri WATS problem. Joe always liked Ma Bell 's lines to be
clean and responsive. A suspicious swithcman reported Joe to se curity
agents who discovered that Joe never had a long-distance call charged to his
name.
Then the security agents learrned that Joe was planning one of his phone
trips to a local switching office. The security people planted one of their
agents in the switching office. He posed as a student switchman and followedJoe around on a tour. He was extremely friendly and helpful to Joe, leading
hi m around the office by the arm. When the tour was over he offered Joe
a ride bac k to his apartment house. On the way he asked Joe--one tech to
another--about "those blue boxes" he'd heard about. J oe talked about them
freely, talked abou t his blue box freely, and about all the other things
he could do with the phones .
The next day the phone-company security agents slapped a monitoring tape
on Joe's line, which eventually picked up an illegal call. Then they
applied for a search warrant and broke in.
In court Joe pleaded not guilty to possession of a blue box and theft of
service. A symapathetic judge reduced the charges to malicious mischief
and found him guilty on that count, sentenc ed him to two thirty-day
sentences to be served concurrently and them suspend ed the sentence on
condition that Joe promise never to play with phones again . Joe promised,
but the phone company refused to restore his service. For tw o weeks after
the trial Joe could not be reached except through the pay phone at his
apartment house, and the landlord screened all calls for him.
Phone-phreak Carl managed to get through to Joe after the trial, and
reported that Joe sounded crushed by the whole affair.
"What I'm worried about," Carl told me, "is that Joe means it this time.
The promise. That he'll never phone-phreak again. That's what he told me,
tha t he's given up phone-phreaking for good. I mean his entire life. he
says he knows they're going to be watching him so closely for the rest of
this life he'll never be able to make a move with out going straight to jail.
It was awfu l to hear him talk that way. I don't kno w. I hope maybe he had
to sound that way. Over the phone, you know."
He reports that the entire phone-phreak underground is up in arms over
the phone company's treatment of Joe. "All the while Joe had his hopes
pinned on his application for a phone-company job , they were stringing him
along getting ready to bust him. That gets me mad. Joe spent most of his
time helping them out. The bastards. They think they ca n use him as an
example. All of the sudden they're harassing us on the coas t. Agents are
jumping up on our lines. They just busted ------'s mute yesterda y and ripped
out his lines. but no matter what Joe does, I don't think we' re going to
take this lying down."
Two weeks later my phone rings and about eight phone phreaks in
succession say hello from about eight different pl aces in the country, among
them Carl, Ed , and Captain Crunch. A nationwide phone -phreak conference
line has been reestablished through a switching machi ne in --------, with
the cooperation of a disgruntled switchman.
"We have a special guest with us to day," Carl tells me.
The next voice I hear is Joe's. He reports happily that he has just
moved to a place called Millington, Tennessee , fifteen miles outside of
Memphis, wher e he has been hired as a telephone-set re pairman by a small
independent phone company. Someday he hopes to be an equ ipment
troubleshooter.
"It's the kind of job I dreamed about. They found out about me from
publicity surrounding the trial. Maybe Ma Bell did me a favor busting me.
I'l l have telephones in my hands all day long."
"You know the expression, 'Don't get mad, get even?'?" phone-phreak Carl
asked me. "Well, I think they're going to be very sorry aobut what they did
