Wrong Numbers

Call Girls, Hackers, and the Mob in Las Vegas

Glen Meek, Dennis N. Griffin

• Publisher: WildBlue Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781948239509
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Institutions & Public Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cybercrime meets organized crime in this true crime story about a hacker attempting to control Sin City's call-girl racket. Was a hacker diverting phone calls meant for Las Vegas escort services?The FBI wanted to know, and so did associates of a New York Mafia family. In one of the most unusual undercover operations ever, the FBI had an agent acting as a manager in a real Las Vegas escort service. Federal agents expected to find prostitution and drugsin the Las Vegas escort industry. What their investigation uncovered was even more serious... Praise for Wrong Numbers "An intriguing and well-researched crime story detailing the intersection of big money and quick sex in the city that contains a lot of both." —Jack Sheehan, author of Skin City "Wiseguys and wannabes are on the hunt for a shadowy hacker who may hold the keys to control of Las Vegas' multi-million dollar call girl racket, while FBI agents are hunting them. The result is a gripping true-life crime story that reads like a collaboration between Elmore Leonard and William Gibson told with the knowing savvy of two longtime chroniclers of Sin City's hidden underbelly." —Kevin Poulsen, author of Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground "In '90s Vegas, call girls worked for "entertainment" services that were little more than phone numbers, dispatchers, and drop safes. When a mystery hacker started diverting customers' calls to one service's number, it launched a series of dangerous events that involved the Mob, feds, hackers, service owners, and the phone system itself. This slice of Sin City history is as little-known as it is thrilling, and it's well-told by investigative journalist Glen Meek and crime writer Dennis Griffin." —Deke Castleman, author of Whale Hunt in the Desert: Secrets of a Vegas Superhost

Chapter One

The Driller Killer

The voice coming over the telephone wiretap was alarming, and the FBI agents listening in knew they would have to act instantly.

“I’ve got to be quiet,” the voice said. “They’re in the other room working on some guy.”

The voice on the phone belonged to Ken Byrnes, a man the authorities suspected was a Mob troubleshooter sent to Las Vegas from New Jersey to help solve problems plaguing Mob-linked escort services. Byrnes was talking to a Vegas escort service owner who, unknown to Byrnes, was also an FBI informant. Federal agents were monitoring and recording the conversation.

“Vinnie brought his power tools,” Byrnes said, then laughed. “I can hear the drill bit going.”

“Vinnie” was Vincent Congiusti, an alleged associate of a New York crime family and, according to federal agents, a reputed hitman and torturer. His “power tools” included a cordless drill which he did not bring to Las Vegas to assemble furniture. Word was Vinnie used the drill to bore holes in the heads or kneecaps of guys who wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to know. This purported practice would later prompt a tabloid newspaper to dub Vinnie “The Driller Killer.”

Vinnie and a couple of other men with alleged Mob ties were in an office complex interrogating a Las Vegas businessman they believed could help them find a mysterious computer programmer. The programmer was thought to be the mastermind behind a phone call diversion scheme that could be costing mob associates millions of dollars. The suspects in this case had been convinced by one of their own that when potential customers called a Mob-linked escort service in Las Vegas, the calls were being electronically intercepted and then redirected to non-Mob affiliated escort operations. Whether the person or persons behind the call stealing scheme knew what kind of people they were messing with was unknown.

Vinnie’s job was to make the businessman, who had connections to the escort industry, fork over the location of the person they believed was behind the phone call diversion operation. No doubt the whine of Vinnie’s drill would make for a powerful inducement, but there was considerable doubt the businessman actually had the information the suspected wiseguys wanted.

The chilling words coming over the wiretap forced federal agents to make a split-second decision: If they rushed in now, it would mean prematurely ending an ongoing, year-long investigation into organized crime’s influence in the Las Vegas escort industry. But, if they didn’t raid the office immediately, they feared an innocent businessman might end up with a head resembling a Wiffle ball.

The decision those agents made, and the remarkable facts about the Las Vegas call girl racket that led up to that decision, is the true story behind “Wrong Numbers.”

Chapter Two

Visit from a Mom-and-Pop Madam

If the tale you are about to read was a movie idea being pitched by a producer to a studio chief, it might go something like this: imagine “Goodfellas” meets “Risky Business” meets “Wargames.”

Somehow, in Las Vegas in the mid-1990s, hired muscle, call girls, computer hackers, and a reputed Mob enforcer who might prefer a Black & Decker to a Smith & Wesson, all became entwined in one of the most unusual organized crime cases in American history. It involved what John Markoff, a writer for the New York Times, would later call “the intersection of the world’s oldest profession with the nation’s newest technology.”

For me, the story started on a spring afternoon with a visit from a nondescript, middle-aged woman who could have been anyone’s grandmother. She’d come to see me because at that time I was an investigative reporter for KTNV-TV, the ABC affiliate in Las Vegas.

Turns out, this matronly woman I’ll call “Helga” ran a modest “outcall entertainment service.” That’s essentially an escort service, which, in turn, is generally a polite term for a call girl operation.

Helga had a problem. Somebody was apparently hacking into the telephone system and stealing phone calls to her service. It was as if someone had switched on the call-forwarding feature of her phone without her knowledge or consent.

If a potential customer in a hotel room on the Las Vegas Strip called her service, for example, the call would not arrive at Helga’s. Some other escort service would receive it. Her call volume suddenly, and mysteriously, had dropped to practically nothing. And this was especially pronounced when major prize fights or other sporting events took place in Las Vegas, traditionally big weekends for the escort businesses.

Naturally, I asked Helga why she didn’t go to the police, since escort and outcall entertainment services were licensed establishments—legitimate as long as they stuck to actually escorting visitors and performing exotic dances.

“You know the police don’t believe the services are legit,” she said. “They have absolutely no sympathy for anything that impacts our business.”

Her point was well taken. Las Vegas Metro police had been claiming for years the outcall services were nothing but fronts for prostitution. Their investigations confirmed this, as in undercover sting after undercover sting, when officers posing as customers called escorts or outcall “dancers” to hotel rooms, virtually every woman who showed up offered sex for money.

From a financial standpoint, the outcall services almost had to be involved in prostitution (which is legal in rural Nevada, but not in Clark County where Las Vegas is located) because no male visitor was likely to call a woman to his room and pay the prices the women were asking just to watch a private dance.

“I’d be surprised if five percent of these girls even know how to dance, I mean in anything resembling a professional manner,” laughs Jack Sheehan, author of Skin City, a book about the sex industry in Las Vegas. “No guy who calls an escort service and has a girl come to his room wants the evening to end with a nude dance. Let’s be real.”

So, there was little debate about what was really going on with the vast majority of escort services. And I wanted to know from Helga why she thought TV news viewers would be interested in a story about an industry many believed was a shady and barely legal front for illegal prostitution.

“Because it’s not just about outcall,” she said. “Right now, they’re targeting us because they figure we’re not likely to complain to the cops. But what happens when this spreads to other, one hundred percent legitimate businesses, like pizza delivery places or cab companies?”

Her question was intriguing, and I was absolutely interested in any criminal conduct that might affect the integrity of the phone system.

But I wanted proof it was actually happening.

“Come to my office later this afternoon,” Helga said. “I’ll show you some proof.”

Her “office” was in an industrial strip mall off of Valley View Boulevard, only a few blocks north of the TV station. It had a roll-up garage door and was the kind of place used by moped rental dealers and small engine repair shops. I admit I had some trepidation about going there alone, as she’d insisted. But I left word at the TV station where I’d be should anything happen.

There was no signage on the place and the door had a speakeasy-style slot where the people inside could see a visitor before granting them admission. When I knocked, Helga let me in.

The office was furnished in Early Garage Sale: an old desk, a PBX phone, and some telephone call logs on the desk surrounding the phone.

Helga pulled out a sheet of paper from the desk, a hotel “folio,” or billing sheet, that showed charges rung up on a room. She said it had been given to her by a man who came to her office with a complaint about one of her escorts.

The folio was from a major strip resort, one of the hotels that charged for local phone calls. One of the numbers Helga used in ads for her service (most services used multiple numbers) was printed on the folio, indicating the customer had called one of Helga’s lines. But Helga showed me her call logs for that night and there was no customer who phoned from that hotel on that evening and she sent no escort there.

Helga went on to explain that the hotel guest was upset because the escort who came to his room “rolled” him. He had reported that while he was taking a shower, at the escort’s request, the escort swiped his cash and a Rolex watch before any business between them was conducted. He’d gotten screwed, but only metaphorically.

Fortunately, when the disgruntled hotel guest came to see Helga, her driver was in the office with her. The driver was a large young man who also sometimes shuttled the escorts to the various hotels to meet their clients and served as a quasi-bodyguard. The hotel guest was angry and didn’t believe Helga when she told him she never sent a woman to his room, that somehow his call had been diverted to another service and that other service was responsible for him being rolled.

The presence of Helga’s driver may have kept the hotel guest from doing anything rash, and the unlucky man was not in a position to go to the cops, what with him being a family man in town on business without his wife. The guest left, but also left behind his hotel folio with the number for Helga’s service on it.

Helga’s story, and the folio from the strip hotel impressed me. Certainly, Helga could have made all this up and possibly forged the documents—but what would be her motive? She certainly didn’t want to call more attention to her business than she needed to.

Before committing to put a story on the air, I wanted to run it by two sources; one in the adult entertainment industry, the other a high-ranking Las Vegas FBI agent.

First, I called the adult entertainment source, a guy named Eddie Munoz, who owned most of the news racks on The Strip. The number and placement of news racks on The Strip was tightly controlled by the county commission, and they were not being used to vend The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. These news racks were filled with pamphlets advertising escorts and outcall “dancers.” The headlines for these publications read something like “Blond Asian MILFs want to meet you tonight!” and generally featured pictures of scantily clad women, although there were a few that also depicted nearly naked men.

Eddie had a license as an outcall entertainment promoter as well as owning news racks. When I got him on the phone, I couldn’t get him to stop talking. He not only confirmed that the same thing that was happening to Helga was happening to him, but said other outcall service owners were also reporting a sudden drop in call volume during peak hours. Eddie was actually contemplating a lawsuit against the phone company.

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