                 *              Secrets of the Little Blue Box               *
                 *                                                           *
                 *                  (Fourth of four files)                   *
        
        The Big Memphis Bust
        
             Joe Engressia never wanted to screw Ma Bell. His dream had always been to 
        work 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 runaround 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 
        when he has guests - it looked as if there was enough telephone hardware to 
        start a small phone company of 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 device 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-tone model; two tape recorders; a heap of phone patches and cassettes, 
        and a life-size toy telephone.
        
             Our conversation is interrupted every ten minutes by phone 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. He wants to talk to 
        Joe about girl friends. 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 an earsplitting 2600-cycle whistle. Joe is pleased to get the calls but 
        he looked worried and preoccupied that evening, his brow constantly furrowed 
        over his dark wandering eyes. In addition to the phone-company stall, he has 
        just learned that his apartment house is due to be demolished in sixty days 
        for urban renewal. For all its shabbiness, the Union Avenue apartment house 
        has been Joe's first home-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 couldn't be reached from Missouri 
        and 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 lines. So I've been calling up 
        switching offices and reporting it, but they haven't corrected it. I called 
        them up for the third time today and instead of checking they just got mad.  
        Well, that gets 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 they 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 dinner at one of Memphis' thirteen 
        Holiday Inns. (Memphis is the headquarters of Holiday Inn. Holiday Inns have 
        been a favorite for Joe ever since he made his first solo phone trip to a Bell 
        switching office in Jacksonville, Florida, and stayed in the Holiday Inn 
        there. He likes to stay at Holiday Inns, he explains, because they represent 
        freedom to him and because the rooms are arranged the same all over the coun-
        try so he knows that any Holiday Inn room is familiar territory to him. Just 
        like any telephone.)
        
             Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restaurant of the Holiday Inn Medical Center 
        on Madison Avenue in Memphis, 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 the phone as he always did, con-
        stantly, put a lock on the phone dial. "I got so mad. When there's a phone 
        sitting there and I can't use it.. so I started getting mad and banging the 
        receiver up and down. I noticed I banged it once and it dialed one. Well, then 
        I tried banging it twice.." In a few minutes Joe learned how to dial by press-
        ing the hook switch at the right time. "I was so excited 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 inter-
        cept non working-number recording in L.A.- I was calling L.A. as far back as 
        that, but I'd mainly dial non working numbers because there was no charge, and 
        I'd listen to these recordings all day. Well, I was whistling 'cause listening 
        to these recordings can be boring after a while even if they are from L.A., 
        and all of a sudden, in the middle of whistling, the recording clicked off. I 
        fiddled around whistling some more, and the same thing happened. So I called 
        up the switch room and said, 'I'm Joe. I'm eight years old and I want to know 
        why when I whistle this tune the line clicks off.' He tried to explain 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 learning. I knew I could go to 
        jail.  But I had to do what I had to do to keep on learning."
        
             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 additional bits of advice and explana-
        tion for me and whatever phone phreak I happen to be visiting. This time the 
        Captain reports he is calling from what he describes as "my hideaway high up 
        in the Sierra Nevada."  He pulses out lusty salvos of M-F and tells Joe he is 
        about to "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 that he and the phone 
        phreaks he knew never used the technique for sabotage. They only learned the 
        technique to help the phone company.
        
             "We do a lot of troubleshooting for them. Like this New Hampshire/Mis-
        souri WATS-line flaw I've been screaming about. 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 had the night before: "I had been 
        caught and they were taking me to a prison. It was a long trip. They were 
        taking me to a prison a long long way away. And we stopped at a Holiday Inn 
        and 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 
        Holiday 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 stand 
        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 a wall, they confiscated every piece of equipment in the room, 
        including his toy telephone. Joe was placed under arrest and taken to the city 
        jail where he was forced to spend the night 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 morning Joe had become convinced that the reporter from Esquire, with 
        whom he had spoken two weeks ago, was the undercover agent. He probably had 
        ugly thoughts about someone he couldn't see gaining his confidence, listening 
        to him talk about his personal obsessions and dreams, while planning all the 
        while to lock him up.
        
             "I really thought he was a reporter," Engressia told the Memphis Press-
        Seminar. "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 reporter.
        
             Ironically, security agents were alerted and began to compile a case 
        against Joe because of one of his acts of love for the system: Joe had called 
        an internal service department to report that he had located a group of defec-
        tive long-distance trunks, and to complain again about the New Hampshire/ 
        Missouri WATS problem. Joe always liked Ma Bell's lines to be clean and re-
        sponsive. A suspicious switchman reported Joe to the security agents who 
        discovered that Joe had never had a long-distance call charged to his name.
        
             Then the security agents learned 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 followed 
        Joe around on a tour. He was extremely friendly and helpful to Joe, leading 
        him around the office by the arm. When the tour was over he offered Joe a ride 
        back to his apartment house. On the way he asked Joe -- one tech man to anoth-
        er -- about "those blue boxers" he'd heard about. Joe talked about them free-
        ly, talked about 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 the search warrant and broke in.
        
             In court Joe pleaded not guilty to possession of a blue box and theft of 
        service. A sympathetic judge reduced the charges to malicious mischief and 
        found him guilty on that count, sentenced him to two thirty-day sentences to 
        be served concurrently and then suspended 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 two 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, that 
        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 his life 
        he'll never be able to make a move without going straight to jail. He sounded 
        very broken up by the whole experience of being in jail. It was awful to hear 
        him talk that way. I don't know. 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 help-
        ing them out. The bastards. They think they can use him as an example. All of 
        sudden they're harassing us on the coast. Agents are jumping up on our lines.  
        They just busted ------'s mute yesterday 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 succes-
        sion say hello from about eight different places in the country, among them 
        Carl, Ed, and Captain Crunch. A nationwide phone-phreak conference line has 
        been reestablished through a switching machine in --------, with the coopera-
        tion of a disgruntled switchman.
        
             "We have a special guest with us today," 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, 
        where he has been hired as a telephone-set repairman by a small independent 
        phone company. Someday he hopes to be an equipment troubleshooter.
        
             "It's the kind of job I dreamed about. They found out about me from the 
        publicity surrounding the trial. Maybe Ma Bell did me a favor busting me. I'll 
        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 about what they did to 
        Joe and what they're trying to do to us."
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