A Million Little Pixels

Flowers does not volunteer much information about his childhood. One event that he has mentioned on his blog and in other settings is his arrest at age 13. Flowers tells the Pitch that the FBI kicked down his door one day. "I had committed wire fraud, which is making free long-distance phone calls."

Flowers says he made the illegal calls to connect to bulletin-board systems, which were precursors to the World Wide Web. "I thought it was ridiculous that I had to pay long-distance charges to connect to another computer, so I figured a way to get around it."

Flowers says he spent several months in a juvenile-detention center in San Diego run by the FBI. He says his confinement coincided with the popularity of the 1983 geek classic WarGames. Adult counselors, he says, worried about his ability to start Armageddon with the push of a few buttons.

Flowers says he survived detention by befriending a big, tough guy named Andre. "I think he blew up a building — it was awful," Flowers recalls of his protector. Flowers showed Andre how to make free calls from a cellblock pay phone. In gratitude, Flowers says, Andre "kind of bodyguarded me."

Juvenile records are sealed, so no public documents exist to support or refute Flowers' story. But the FBI does not run detention centers. Juveniles convicted of federal crimes do their time at facilities run by state or local governments. "It sounds kind of fishy," Sandra Hijar, a spokeswoman for the Western Regional Office of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, tells the Pitch after hearing Flowers' tale of incarceration at age 13. "I have never heard of a juvenile FBI facility."

True or false, Flowers' story bears similarities to the plight of John Draper, a famous figure in computer circles. Draper discovered in the 1960s that a toy whistle found in certain cereal boxes could be used to manipulate long-distance calling switches. The subject of a 1971 Esquire story, in which he was identified only as "Captain Crunch," Draper taught future Apple founders Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak his secrets. He was later tracked down by the FBI and spent time in prison.

After his release, Flowers says he left home when he was not quite 16 and moved in with a friend who had an apartment. He got a job delivering pizza and tried to stay in school, he says. Often unsure of dates and places ("Temporality eludes me for some reason," he says), Flowers guesses that he lived in Texas at the time he left home. He says he moved to Massachusetts and then Berkeley.

Flowers' teenage years would provide still another amazing technology-related story: He claims to have come up with an idea for making movie times available by phone.

Flowers wrote a version of the story on his blog two years ago: In the early 1990s, Flowers was staring at a poster for the movie Three Days of the Condor when lightning struck: a computer program that generated lists of theaters and show times from zip codes. Flowers submitted the idea to a contest run by the telephone industry. "Six days later," he wrote, "someone wrote a check for what we called 444-FILM and I purchased a brand new, 1990 Porsche Carrera 911 4X4 with the profit ..."

In an interview, Flowers does not say that his application became Moviefone, the company behind 777-FILM. Rather, he notes that he came up with the idea the year before Moviefone launched. Editing the story he told on his blog, Flowers tells the Pitch that he wrote the program in 1988, not the early 1990s, perhaps remembering that Moviefone launched in 1989.

AOL bought Moviefone in 1999 for $388 million, but Flowers claims no bitterness. "I was 17, and somebody wrote me a check for $80,000 because of a computer thing that I did," he says.

Like the arrest, the 444-FILM story is unverifiable. Flowers says confidentiality agreements prevent him from revealing the identity of the person who wrote the $80,000 check.

But Russ Leatherman, a Moviefone founder (as well as the famous voice of 777-FILM), tells the Pitch through a spokesman that he's never heard of Flowers.

Doubt surrounds another story that Flowers likes to tell: his contest-winning performances at Def Con.

The annual Las Vegas hacker convention called Def Con was founded by Jeff Moss in 1993. When a Pitch reporter recounted the story Flowers told at the Kauffman Foundation, Moss quickly answered: "Utter bullshit."

The convention didn't include a Capture the Flag contest until the fourth Def Con in 1996, Moss says — not 1994 or 1995, years in which Flowers has claimed to have won the prize. Moss recalls that another individual won the first two Capture the Flag contests. "It was this guy called A.J. Reznor, who won it in a pretty famous way," Moss says. "This guy won it with no monitor, attacking the machine with a keyboard only. He memorized the entire attack and did it."