Romania — He reveled in tormenting members of the Bush family, Colin L. Powell and a host of other prominent Americans, and also in outfoxing the F.B.I. and the Secret Service, foiling their efforts to discover even his nationality, never mind his identity. Early this year, however, the elusive online outlaw known as Guccifer lost his cocky composure and began to panic.
He smashed his hard drive and cellphone with an ax.
That
spasm of precautionary destruction, at his home in Romania’s
Transylvania region, did not help him much — especially as he left
pieces of what would later become evidence scattered in the mud.
Two
weeks later, on Jan. 22, a global hunt for the celebrated and
mysterious hacker who first revealed self-portraits painted by George W.
Bush and plundered a trove of personal emails from politicians,
military officers and celebrities finally ended in an early morning raid
of his home.
“I
was expecting them, but the shock was still very big for me,” the
hacker, now serving a seven-year sentence, said. He spoke in an
interview, his first, at the Arad Penitentiary here. “It is hard to be a
hacker, but even harder to erase your tracks.”
In
many ways, however, his two-year rampage through the email accounts of
rich and powerful Americans showed how easy it can be to go rogue on the
Internet and, even when armed with only rudimentary skills, to stay one
step ahead of the law, at least for a while.
The
hacker who signed off as Guccifer (pronounced GUCCI-fer) — a nom de
guerre coined, he said, to combine “the style of Gucci and the light of
Lucifer” — turned out to be Marcel-Lehel Lazar, a jobless 43-year-old
former taxi driver. He had no expertise in computers, no fancy
equipment, only a clunky NEC desktop and a Samsung cellphone, and no
special skills beyond what he had picked up on the web.
Romanian
officials say the United States has not asked Romania to extradite Mr.
Lazar but has sent investigators to question him to learn how he managed
to prey on so many powerful Americans. The United States Justice
Department declined to comment.
Before
agreeing to answer questions from The New York Times in prison, where
he shares a cell with four others, including two convicted murderers, he
read out a lengthy handwritten statement that he said explained the
purpose of his hacking.
A
potpourri of conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, the 1997 death of Princess Diana and alleged plans for a
nuclear attack in Chicago in 2015, it said: “This world is run by a
group of conspirators called the Council of Illuminati, very rich
people, noble families, bankers and industrialists from the 19th and
20th century.”
Mr.
Badea, the Romanian prosecutor, scoffed at Mr. Lazar’s fixation on
so-called Illuminati as a ruse intended to give a political gloss to a
peeping-tom hacking addiction. The hacking exploits that led to his 2011
conviction involved “no Illuminati, just famous and beautiful girls,”
the prosecutor said.
Mr.
Lazar denied any interest in celebrities, asserting that he had only
stumbled on most of the people he hacked as Guccifer, a long list that
included the actress Mariel Hemingway, the “Sex and the City” author
Candace Bushnell, the editor Tina Brown, the comedian Steve Martin, the
author Kitty Kelley and many others.
Mr. Lazar said he could have covered his tracks better if he had had more money — for a more powerful computer, for instance.
“Of
course, I could have stolen money from them,” he said, distancing
himself from the legions of his countrymen who have made Romania, the
second-poorest country in the 28-member European Union, a global leader
in Internet fraud. “I didn’t. Not a single dollar.”
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