Hi and welcome to Cyber Reasons malicious life, I'm Ren Levin. 11.

It's early 2004 and one of the two or three greatest cyber criminals to ever walk the planet,

Albert Gonzales, is on the sometimes all day and night. He works alongside bona fide agents out of a satellite office

in an army repair garage in Jersey City.

And those agents actually like him.

One prosecutor later told the New York Times,

quote, it was kind of a bonding experience.

He and the agents developed over time a very close bond. They worked well together.

End quote. They even gave him a nickname, Soup, a play of his online persona, soup Nazi.

And Albert is teaching them all kinds of new things.

It's like when he was 14 and the FBI visited to figure out how a kid who'd only just reach

puberty managed to hack into NASA.

Remember what happened? An agent took Albert into a room. They sat there for an

entire afternoon and by the time they came out it was the agent, not the child, who was left dizzy.

This kid is amazing, Albert's lawyer recalled the man saying.

He's running circles around me.

Now at 23, Albert is running circles around the Secret Service. The prosecutor recalled how,

spending this much time with an informant this deeply

into a cybercrime conspiracy, it was a totally new experience for all of us."

End quote.

By springtime, the service trusted Albert enough to make him the Falcrum for the biggest ever cyber operation.

It's ironic, actually, that they were about to use one of history's greatest cyber criminals to attempt the most

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