few days. He was rafting on the Green River in Utah on the days of the electronic break-in, and the calls were definitely local, not long distance.”
“Hmm. Perfect timing.”
“Yes. Someone was very good at homework, don’t you think?”
“No chance that this fellow had a grudge? Maybe hired someone else to do the programming?”
Guy shook his head. “He had nothing to gain. We think it was just a prank.”
“A costly one.”
“Yes. That is the shame, although few people would see that. No one has much sympathy for bankers.”
I understood his point. Most people wouldn’t stop to think that the bank counted on those fees for its operations expenses. It wouldn’t go broke from this prank, but somewhere the bottom line would be affected; fees would go up, or there would be less money to lend.
“It could have been worse,” Guy said. “Much worse. And our security is better now.” He paused and smiled. “Who knows? Perhaps we will gain something from the good publicity about waiving the fees.”
The second prank was not hidden from the public eye. A few weeks after the bank incident, all street-sweeping ticket records were deleted from the municipal computers. When the city’s computer department reached for a separately stored backup file, it was found to be blank, with the exception of one text file: “All street-sweeping fines are forgiven. We are Hocus.”
“That’s an odd name,” Lydia Ames observed when I came into the office with the story. She’s the assistant city editor at the
“A perfect name,” said John Walters.
“They think of themselves as magicians?” she asked.
“You’re thinking of hocus-pocus,” I replied. “I made the same mistake, until I looked the word up in the dictionary. Hocus is a verb. It means to play a trick on, to dupe. It may be where the word ‘hoax’ comes from.”
“The cheering will be heard citywide,” John said with a scowl. “No one likes parking tickets. But I like tricksters even less.”
“I had the same reaction,” I said, “right after I decided what I was going to do with the money Hocus saved me on tickets.”
The next action came about a week later. All outstanding library fines were eliminated from the city library’s computer system. The message “All fines are forgiven, courtesy of Hocus” appeared briefly on the screens one Monday morning. As the city investigated this new breach of security, the bank — given the promise that the information would remain confidential — let the Las Piernas Police Department know that Hocus had taken credit for the fee waiver at the bank.
At first, citizens cheered the news about the library fines as heartily as they had cheered the earlier announcements. No one liked fines. But the library was more forthcoming than the bank or the municipal court — already strapped by budget cutbacks, it couldn’t afford the loss of revenue. Libraries would be closed on weekends until further notice.
Parents of kids with homework projects were the first to howl, and others quickly joined in. A fund-raiser was held, and the library reopened on Saturdays. Now the local citizenry seemed to understand that damage could be done.
The people of Las Piernas began to ask the same questions that computer security personnel had asked all along. Who were these people? How many of them were there? What was Hocus trying to prove? How had they managed to break into these computer systems? And perhaps most important, what would they do next?
In those days all the actions Hocus took had fit with its name. Pranks. No one was taking revenues, they were just preventing the collection of revenues.
Computer experts were called in, and any organization using computers did its best to heighten security. We waited for the next trick.
When it came, we were taken completely by surprise.
An animal rights group was blamed at first. In the immediate chaos that followed the release of every creature in the city animal shelter, the body of the night manager lay undiscovered for over three hours.
If you open a birdcage or two, even let out a couple of snakes, not much is going to happen. Set twenty or thirty cats loose and then release just over two hundred dogs not long afterward, and you’re going to see some action. Let a horse be the grand finale, and people will definitely notice.
The birds flew off, and the snakes were never found again. The horse was old and skinny and didn’t go much farther than the first open field he came across. The cats apparently had enough lead time to climb trees or make themselves scarce. The dogs were another story.
Social beings that they are, the dogs must have decided these adventures were more fun when shared, and most of them gathered into packs as they set off through the streets. Some packs announced their freedom as they ran.
Most of the police activity in those early hours centered on rounding up animals, especially those dogs that had been quarantined for viciousness.
Two men were on duty that night: the night shift manager and an animal control officer. The animal control officer had gone out on an emergency call that turned out to be bogus. Before he could return, the police were contacting him by radio about the calls they were getting.
For all the pandemonium on the streets nearest the shelter, the shelter itself was eerily quiet. The night manager didn’t seem to be on the premises, and a second truck was gone. At first, everyone thought he was out catching dogs. The truck was found much later, abandoned under a freeway overpass.
The shelter actually ended up with more dogs than it started out with — if not necessarily the same dogs — since the previous inmates had picked up some sympathizers along the way. It was only after the dogs had been caught that anyone could spend much time at the shelter itself, trying to figure out what had happened.
