The Identity Addict

How a restaurant worker without a high school degree stole millions from the richest people in america

Prologue

In the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which roars overhead day and night, stands the Metropolitan Detention Center, a complex of massive windowless buildings surrounded by concrete bunkers and razor wire. The MDC is a serious federal prison; it houses some 2,500 of the most dangerous sociopaths to have passed through the New York courts, including mobsters and suspected terrorists. In March 2001 it added to its population inmate number 26965-053, a sad-eyed 32-year-old Jordanian American whose given name is Abraham Abdallah but who, at the time of his arrest on 12 counts of felony fraud, was also known as Paul Allen, George Soros, William Gates, Andrew McKelvey, Charles Schwab, Steven Spielberg and Martha Stewart.

Abdallah is an identity thief. According to experienced hands in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and New York Police Department, he is the best identity thief who has ever lived. While he was working as a busboy and prep cook at a Brooklyn restaurant, Abdallah, who is a high school dropout, penetrated security at the most sophisticated financial firms in the world--Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Fidelity and Charles Schwab, to name a few. He assumed the financial identities of more than 200 of the individuals on the Forbes 400 list, which, is subtitled, for the unknowing, "The Richest People in America." Abdallah took possession of more than $260 million in other people's money and was well on his way to hitting his goal of $1 billion. He had filed plans to open his own offshore bank, and indeed he may well have succeeded had he not committed the costliest mistake of his career.

It was a young detective from the NYPD's nascent Computer Investigations and Technology Unit who found and followed the clues to put together the investigation that brought him down. Abdallah's arrest in early March 2001 created a brief blast of media attention, but the Brooklyn man avoided the press and refused all comment on his crime, leaving untold the unlikely tale of how an uneducated restaurant worker had managed to commit the most brazen identity thefts in American history. Shortly after his arrest I wrote him a long letter requesting an interview. His reply, filled with misspellings and botched grammar, was a polite turndown. Three years later, however, after a voluminous correspondence had passed between us, he finally consented to see me at the MDC.

I walked through a security gantlet of metal detectors, X-ray machines and rows of electronically controlled gates--a procedure that involved getting my hand stamped with ultraviolet ink--and was finally led into a featureless room where Abdallah, now 36, was waiting. He was zipped up in an orange prisoner jumpsuit, looking older than he had in the mug shot that appeared in the tabloids. His thin black hair had lost more ground to his scalp, and his eyes were dark and puffy from sleeplessness. He seemed shy and spoke softly with a pronounced Brooklyn accent. We had both grown up in New York, so we reminisced about the city of the 1980s and the fake-ID joints in Times Square that were frequented by underage drinkers. Finally he told me I could turn on the digital recorder. "I'll tell you the story," he said, "but you have to realize that, even though I'm the best, the truth is they make it so easy to do these frauds. Any 12-year-old could do it."

The year is 1986. A smiling, bushy-haired 17-year-old Abdallah sits at a table, talking--laughing at times--as he tells of his former life as a stockbroker. The teenager brags about his black Corvette, which he'd equipped with a telephone. He talks about the mortgage he took out on a piece of pricey real estate and how he withdrew $50,000 at a time from his bank accounts. Of course, the real stockbroker, whose name and identity Abdallah had picked up from a direct-mail solicitation, ultimately discovered this activity, and the escapade went down as the identity thief's first brush with federal law.

In a training video produced by the U.S. Postal Service that Abdallah participated in as part of a plea bargain, he tells investigators how it was done: All he did was fill out a couple of forms using information from the broker's business card and wait for the money to arrive. "I really just did it to see if I could," he says cheerfully. "I never meant to hurt anybody."

"Could you take out a credit card in my name?" asks a voice off-camera. Abdallah smiles. "Of course," he says. "Once you get a credit report, you can get anybody's--I don't care if it's Ronald Reagan's."

"What about a mortgage? Could you take out a mortgage in my name?" the voice asks.

"Depends on how good your credit is," says Abdallah.

The video ends with the arresting agent declaring that identity theft is the crime of the future. He warns that stopping it "may well be beyond the scope of this agency."

He was right on both counts. Identity theft has been on the rise since the 1980s, in large part because credit card companies began direct-mail marketing campaigns and fraudsters learned to take advantage of the mail-in applications. In the 1990s, as banks and consumer database companies moved their businesses online, identity theft became an even easier crime to commit, and today it is proliferating along with Internet access. Last year thieves struck a reported 10 million people, an 80 percent increase from the year before, according to the Federal Trade Commission and an independent research firm. The actual numbers are thought to be far higher because the crime typically goes undetected for years. When a theft is discovered, the perpetrator is rarely caught; fewer than one in 700 identity thefts are ever investigated. This brand of larceny is a virtual crime, and thieves leave little or no physical evidence.

Banks and insurance policies absorb the cost of the crime--$47.6 billion last year--on the corporate level. "The banks are in a tough position," one FBI agent tells me. "They're torn between customer service and security. They want to make it easy for customers to access information, to see their accounts online. But that also makes it easy for criminals."

No one has taken better advantage of this situation than Abraham Abdallah. During a criminal career that started, when he was 15, with simple credit card fraud and evolved to include complex wire-transfer schemes and overseas money transfers, he trained himself to become a master thief, a "pioneer when it comes to fraud," in the words of one FBI agent who had tracked him for a decade. Indeed, among fraud investigators, Abdallah's career is often used as a case study and cited as empirical proof of the system's vulnerabilities. "Abraham wrote the book," says the veteran FBI agent. "If society had a few more like him, we would be in very big trouble."

By the time he was 30 years old, Abdallah had been arrested 25 times. Over the years the crime never changed; he simply raised the stakes with each attempt, culminating in the six-month spree against the Forbes 400. By his own account, in late January of 2001 he possessed about $260 million free and clear. But rather than jet off to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of treasury notes, as he had promised himself he would do, he stayed in Brooklyn and continued scamming. He says he suffers from a peculiar addiction: The act of stealing identities has become so intensely pleasurable that he must fight it as an alcoholic would a drink. As the century turned, after serving a year in federal prison on fraud charges, he vowed to make a fresh start.

Part 1: A New Beginning

In the fall of 1999 Abdallah was a free man. He decided he would never go back to a cell. "I hate what I do," he wrote to the judge supervising his parole. "You have no idea what it's like to wake up every morning knowing you have ruined your life and knowing you can do better." He returned to his parents' town house in the leafy middle-class neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn and moved into his old room on the top floor, down the hall from his father and stepmother. He found a job bussing tables and doing kitchen prep work at Zaytoons, a Middle Eastern restaurant on Smith Street, a lively boulevard crammed with shops and boutiques just a few blocks from his house. Six days a week he walked to the restaurant, then descended a steep staircase to the basement, where, in a narrow alcove lined with butcher block, he spent his shift chopping vegetables--cutting box loads of carrots and cucumbers into smaller and smaller pieces.

The job satisfied the condition of his parole that he remain gainfully employed, but he disliked the monotony of the work, and he hated being 31 years old, living at home and earning $150 a week. What he really wanted was to be a Wall Street executive, he says, a business success. He had nurtured this dream since he was eight years old, when he starting reading The Wall Street Journal and tracking his favorite stocks the way most kids follow sports teams. "I always wanted to be one of those brainiacs--one of those guys who make a lot of money in the market--or a CEO," he says. He thought he could replicate the success he'd had thus far as a criminal: "Between $10 million and $15 million over the years" was how he estimated his gains. Before his most recent arrest, he had enjoyed a flashy lifestyle of expensive cars and high-end prostitutes, but now he would rise to the top legally. In his more optimistic moments, he even planned to get married and start a family if, in keeping with his family's tradition of arranged marriages, his father could find him a suitable bride.

While he toiled in the overheated restaurant basement, he developed a plan to buy foreclosed rental properties in Brooklyn. His older brother, Tony, who works for New York City Transit, was to act as the frontman in the business, and Abraham would be a silent partner. This would add to the family's holdings. The Abdallahs had owned as many as five buildings in Brooklyn worth several million dollars--and which the police allege, but have never been able to prove, had been purchased with ill-gotten gains. Walking to work one day, Abdallah noticed that the Smith Street area was lacking an ice cream store, so he added an ice cream franchise to the empire he planned to build. "I had the money for down payments," he says. "All I needed was 60 grand. That's nothing."

When Abdallah's parole officer learned of the plan, however, he put an end to it, given Abdallah's history of defrauding banks. "I wanted to open a Haagen-Dazs," he says. "Summer was coming. But I couldn't get the financing past my parole officer. He wouldn't give me an inch. Three months later a Ben & Jerry's opened a block away, and it made a killing." He shakes his head slowly. "Man, I wanted to be a success so bad."

With several felony convictions marring his record and no marketable skills or education--and seeing no way out of being a busboy for the rest of his life, Abdallah says--he began "feeling really stressed-out and depressed." He decided then to do what he did best, but this time he planned to give his ambitions free rein. "I figured for the same work and preparation required to do $1 million or $1.6 million, I could do $100 million," he says. "So why bother with the small money?" In September 2000 Abdallah's copy of Forbes magazine's 400 richest Americans issue arrived in the mail, and he began going down the list, beginning with Bill Gates.

By this point in his career Abdallah had systematized his methods. He didn't try to steal an identity all at once. He broke down a person's financial persona into its components and gradually acquired each piece. The first and most important was the Social Security number, which, since its inception in 1935 as a way for the government to track retirement accounts, has become a de facto identity number. With a Social Security number and a little bravado, he could easily obtain everything else--bank records, passwords, mother's maiden name, place of birth, date of birth, address and phone number.

This is how he did it: Posing as an executive with Sprint, Abdallah called a Texas private investigator whose name he'd found online and said that Sprint was looking for someone to conduct background checks. "All I need from you, if you're interested, is a copy of your rates and a copy of your PI license," he said. The investigator faxed all his information, and Abdallah used it to open an account with an online database company catering to private investigators. This site gave him "unlimited Social Security numbers and addresses for $300 a month."

As he went through the list, he obtained the credit reports of his victims, a task he accomplished by duping the three major credit agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. On his computer, he made replicas of bank stationery. Impersonating a member of a bank's human resources department, he wrote to the credit bureaus. He used the Social Security numbers he'd obtained to request credit reports. Whenever he handled a document, he wore gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. He never signed the documents himself, because he knew handwriting analysis was often used to identify forgers. Instead, he took his paperwork to the local basketball court and paid the kids there $50 to do the job.

In October 2000 he was ready to take the next step. During a break from his restaurant shift, Abdallah called Merrill Lynch on his cell phone and introduced himself as George Soros. The account representative didn't fully believe what she was hearing. "Are you the George Soros?" she asked.

Abdallah didn't pause before answering. Though his reply was crucial--for he had already stirred the bank employee's suspicion, and a miscue this early in the conversation would transfer the call to the fraud department--he was now winging it, he says, to keep the conversation going long enough to allay her fears.

"No, that's my father. I'm his son," he said, calculating that it was safer to confirm her suspicion than to fight it. He reeled off Soros's Social Security number and birth date, and the account rep pulled up four accounts. "They make it so easy," he says. "They never check anything."

The accounts, he was told, had zero balances. Abdallah was disappointed. Jeez, he thought, where is this guy's money? Since he had a cooperative representative on the line, he decided not to waste the opportunity. "Under his name, I decided to open a separate account and deposit a counterfeit check for $10 million. I had a fifty-fifty shot that it would go through," he says. "The guy is well-known in the industry, and $10 million is nothing to them."

The unusual activity on Soros's account triggered a review at the bank, and when Abdallah's forged check arrived, it was scrutinized. The account numbers were accurate and the signature correct, but after investigators called the issuing bank, the coloring of the watermark was determined to be slightly off, so the check did not clear. The NYPD and the U.S. Secret Service were alerted.

Abdallah called Merrill Lynch's fraud department directly, this time posing as Richard Reinhardt, the Secret Service agent who had arrested him in 1991. He explained he was investigating a possible fraud and asked if they'd received any forged checks lately. "Oh yes," he was told. "We already talked to another agent about it."

He was not discouraged. "You always know the feds are going to get involved in a case like this," he tells me during the prison interview. He planned to stay a step ahead and keep tabs on their investigation by periodically calling the bank and posing as an agent.

Part 2: Operation Ceo

At the NYPD's Computer Investigations and Technology Unit, Detective Michael Fabozzi was a rising star who had made a canny career choice in the early 1990s. Back then, identity theft was a law enforcement backwater, and the squad had been staffed by a few technicians, computer repairmen and programmers. Fabozzi's decision seemed quixotic, but the Staten Island native, who had worked briefly in finance before becoming a cop, considered banking frauds more challenging than homicide and narcotics cases. As the Internet grew, Fabozzi's choice proved prescient.

Fabozzi keeps his brown hair cut in a modified Beatles style; together with his inquisitive brown eyes and slim, athletic build, it gives him a youthful appearance that belies his 39 years. He is a thoughtful guy, gentle in his demeanor but tall and fit. He played guard on his college basketball team, and he seems to approach police work with the playmaking mind-set he had shown on the court.

A few days after he was assigned to look into the Soros check, Fabozzi received a report from a bank investigator that the identity of Goldman Sachs chairman Hank Paulson had been stolen. The thief had posed as Paulson (continued on page 152) Identity Addict (continued from page 116) in a series of phone calls and e-mails to bank employees, then attempted to transfer $1.5 million out of Paulson's personal account. Fabozzi also heard that Paul Allen--or someone pretending to be the Microsoft billionaire--had transferred $10 million into an overseas account without obtaining the usual permissions. By the end of the month, after canvassing every major bank and brokerage house in New York, Fabozzi had more names to add to his list of victims, and he suspected there were others he didn't know about. He went to his boss and stated what had, by then, become the only obvious conclusion to be drawn from the list: "Someone is targeting business celebrities."

For Fabozzi the case held special significance. Not only did it involve prominent victims, it vividly illustrated a point he'd been trying to make for years about the financial system's vulnerability to identity theft.

He found few leads. The only trail the thief left behind was an anonymous Internet address, [email protected], which had been used to open several illegal accounts. Tracing the e-mail back to an ISP address, a computer's unique Internet identifier, Fabozzi found it had originated at the Brooklyn Public Library, where four dirty beige terminals were handled by thousands of people each week. Abdallah was routing his computer traffic through the public library's computers from a wireless laptop.

By November 2000, crack agents from the Secret Service and Postal Service joined the NYPD in Operation CEO, as it was now called, but authorities were no closer to finding their suspect than they had been on the day Fabozzi started the case. They were still hunting a man whose name they didn't know and whose face they'd never seen--a ghost who was stealing millions and whose only physical presence was a blip on the Internet. Operation CEO had become a personal matter for Fabozzi, and he grew so obsessed with the case that he had trouble sleeping. He awoke in the middle of the night, thinking, This guy really knows how the system works. He's doing it exactly the way I would if I ever turned bad.

•

Abdallah started a new con shortly after the Soros setback. His opportunity came in the mail, in the form of a rebate check from Canon for a printer he had purchased months earlier. This was not a coincidence. One of the things he would do to ensure a steady supply of raw material for forging checks was to overpay for items so he'd be sent rebates; the face of the check lists the corporation's account number. By calling the bank, Abdallah was able to determine that his $30 rebate check was linked to a Canon corporate account stocked with as much as $50 million. Using his new printer, he produced a second check with the original check's account code, changing the amount payable from $30 to $6.5 million.

He made out the check to his newly minted identity, an IBM executive named John Williams. Abdallah gave Williams a complete work history. He drew up several years' worth of tax returns, thus verifying his income, and printed out pay stubs with an IBM logo. He took a photograph from Sports Illustrated and used it to doctor a passport. He applied for and was given a credit card in John Williams's name, and with it he opened an account at a Bahamas bank. After transferring $100 from Williams's credit card to the bank to keep the account active, he sent the bank the forged $6.5 million check. He waited three days for the check to clear, constantly checking Canon's account to see if its balance had changed. On the fourth day he lost patience and called the bank. "They said yes, the check is good," he recalls. "But then they said they called IBM and found out nobody by that name worked there."

The collapse of the Canon scam did not deter him. Looking for vulnerabilities, he was still testing the system. He recalls, "It became a challenge to see if I could get the checks to clear."

On December 21 Abdallah settled on a new mark. After reviewing hundreds of accounts culled from the Forbes list, he decided he would steal the financial soul of Andrew McKelvey, the owner of Monster.com, who was worth an estimated $2.1 billion. He began by calling McKelvey's brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. The interaction was captured by an automatic recorder.

"Good evening, this is John Smith with customer service. How can I help you?"

"Good evening, John. I'm having problems going online."

"What is your account number?"

Abdallah reads an account number into the phone, but the number is incorrect.

"You did something wrong. That can't be the number," says the customer service representative. "What's your name?"

"Andrew McKelvey."

"What's your Social Security number?"

Abdallah provides the correct number.

"Were you trying to reach Merrill Lynch online, sir?"

"I'm trying to access my account."

"Okay, bear with me one moment. Do you have another account number? That would help me."

Abdallah repeats the wrong number he gave the first time.

"Did you by any chance close any of your accounts, sir?"

"No."

"Okay. Do you have an account with money in it?"

"Yeah, over a hundred," Abdallah says, being intentionally vague. By not specifying $100, $100,000 or $100 million, he doesn't convey his ignorance and makes it appear as if he has the account information right in front of him on paper.

"Hold on for a second, please. Okay, is there a name on the account?"

"Andrew McKelvey."

"Is it in care of anyone?"

"Monster.com."

"Okay. I can't find the account you gave me. There are a lot of accounts with money in them, but they are business accounts. Do you have a log-in number?"

"No. How do I get access to the accounts?"

"I need to verify your personal information. What is your Social Security number?"

Abdallah answers, as if reciting from memory.

"Date of birth?"

He answers.

"Address?"

He answers.

"The account number is 55XXXXXXX."

"Do I need the log-in ID?"

"That is the log-in ID. Do you have a password?"

"No, I don't."

"The computers are very slow. Please hold on."

"I know the feeling."

"Okay. The log-in is the last six digits of your Social. Here is the password: 34XXXX. Is there anything else I can help you with today, sir?"

"No, thanks."

"Thank you for calling Merrill Lynch, and have a nice evening, sir."

A few minutes after he hung up the phone, Abdallah called Merrill Lynch again. His objective, now that he had the proper codes, was to find out how much money McKelvey had available.

The Merrill Lynch representative asks how she can help him.

"Yeah, I wanna find out my account balances."

"What is your account number, sir?"

Abdallah provides the correct number he has just obtained.

"Just one moment, sir. Could you please verify your name, Social Security number and address?"

Abdallah provides the information.

"I can tell you on that account, as of the close of business yesterday, you have $53,370.86. It will not be updated until the morning."

Guessing that McKelvey has much more money stashed in another account, Abdallah asks, "Do you have access to my other accounts? I don't know the account numbers offhand."

"I'll take a look, sir. What kind of account would I be looking for?"

"A corporate account."

"I need you to verify your Social Security number."

He does.

"So you just want the two corporate accounts that I see here?"

"Yes."

"Which one did you want? The one that is managed by a financial management firm? The one that might have a great deal of money in it?"

"Yeah, that one."

"The one with $270 million?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. The balance on that account is $277,133,233, as of the close of business yesterday."

The conversation continues, and Abdallah asks how he can link that account to a so-called direct account, which he has already opened with Merrill Lynch in McKelvey's name. If he can link the two accounts and transfer money from the corporate account into the direct one, he can withdraw the funds as cash or send them to another bank account in McKelvey's name. Abdallah calls Merrill Lynch twice more in the next hour and is finally able to link the two accounts. Abdallah then transfers $200 million in stock to the new account.

Part III: You Can't Imagine

One day in early January 2001, Fabozzi was walking down the halls of police headquarters at One Police Plaza when he bumped into a colleague who happened to be working a separate investigation into credit card fraud. He mentioned that several of the stolen cards were being used to purchase computer equipment that was then shipped to a PostNet store at 29 John Street in lower Manhattan.

That address matched the one listed on Paul Allen's fraudulent account, and Fabozzi took an educated guess that the cases might be connected. "Next time you got a package going there, let me know," Fabozzi said.

That month, one of the stolen cards was used to buy a mobile credit card reader with a keypad. It was to be shipped to 29 John Street. Fabozzi set up a sting. Police intercepted the package en route to the PostNet store and hid a tracking device inside the box. But on the day of the pickup, the courier Abdallah had sent to retrieve the package suspected something was amiss and drove away with the trunk open as undercover agents started to approach the car. He drove off so quickly that not one of the agents was able to catch the car's license plate number, and nobody had seen the driver's face.

"I was absolutely furious," Fabozzi recalls. "It was a total disaster."

•

The elation Abdallah had felt about controlling such a large sum quickly disappeared. He began compulsively logging on to the Merrill Lynch website to check the McKelvey accounts. "I would try to say, 'I'm feeling good. I'm not depressed,' " he recalls. "And then when the high wears down, that's when I feel the guilt, because I have to do the whole thing again, do it all over, to get up again." He continued his attacks against others on the Forbes list. He compiled information on more than 200 of them and spent his days going down the list name by name, trying to infiltrate their financial identities. At one point he was able to impersonate Paul Allen and open accounts in his name. To make them seem legitimate, he set up a voice-mail account with the message "Hello, this is Paul Allen. I'm away from my desk. But if you leave a message I'll get right back to you."

To support the scheme, he also opened several hundred bank accounts in different names all over the country, as well as dozens more abroad in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Isle of Man and elsewhere. "It was such a pain in the ass opening up an account in all these tax havens that don't release information to the United States government," he says. He tried as much as possible to sign papers via fax, but when a signature was required in person, Abdallah was willing to travel.

In the winter of 2001 he had so many bank account applications pending in locations around the world, he decided it was worth the risk of leaving the country to get them settled. He dressed in a blazer and button-down shirt and flew to Amsterdam, the Bahamas and Fiji with a brunette call girl he'd hired for $3,500 plus food, shopping and first-class accommodations. He says the trips were not pleasure cruises: "You have no idea how taxing it is. Sure, you have a girl, but when you're traveling just to open accounts, it's very tiring."

Acting the part of a harried executive who couldn't keep track of his funds, Abdallah said, "Could we just go down the list?" The customer service representative would read him the last three numbers of the account, and he would give her the whole account number. Then he said, "I need to set up another account, and I want to transfer something from each of these accounts into this account."

Abdallah transferred "about $38 million," by his reckoning, from Intel's Gordon Moore into an account he'd opened in Gibraltar, which has strict bank-privacy laws. "It's amazing how easy they make it seem," he says. "There are no callbacks. There's no verification. Nothing. The representative asked me twice, 'What's your account code?' I told her I didn't have it with me. She said, 'Oh, you should always keep that handy in case you need it.' I said, 'I know, I know, but because of the balance in my account, I really don't like to keep the number with me. And I should remember it.' "

Abdallah was constantly in motion--moving cash, hiding cash and withdrawing cash. He needed several notebooks to keep track of all the accounts he'd opened. "I was getting tired of the whole thing," he says. To maintain appearances he continued to chop vegetables daily in the basement of Zaytoons, but inside he was feverish. "I don't remember much of the time," he says now. "There was so much going on at once. I couldn't keep track of everything. I was staying up at night to open accounts in Hong Kong. I had to hire translators. And the forms they made me fill out--they were huge. I mean, pages and pages." He sighs and looks searchingly into my face. "It was so much. You can't imagine."

By this point, the cycle of excitement and guilt had become so destabilizing that Abdallah considered having himself "committed in the hospital," he says. But in the end, he couldn't bring himself to quit, to leave behind the thrill of getting over on the system. "I couldn't stop. I wanted to stop, but I couldn't," he tells me. "I wanted to be such a success so bad. I wanted to do this on my own."

He was torn between "lying low for a year with $100 million" and continuing onward "for half a billion or a billion." He felt that the success he desired so strongly was close at hand. "Everything was in place for a billion," he says. "For all the work I had done for the first $100 million, the second $100 million was easier. And I thought, Well, why not go for a billion?" He planned to disappear in Europe after he got the money and eventually set up an investment firm.

But he felt there was one final step to becoming a success. During his most recent prison stay, Abdallah had rubbed elbows with two men he came to idolize: junk-bond king Michael Milken and a Swiss banker serving time for laundering drug money. He befriended both men, he says, and one day he asked the banker for some tips on how to hide stolen money. "Charter your own bank," the man said. So in late February, Abdallah decided to do just that. The theory as he explained it to me was "if you control the charter, you control everything. If you have your own bank and you deposit a check in your account, that bank has the last record. Once that bank closes, everything dies with it." A bank could be chartered in Africa for a $20,000 fee, Abdallah learned, and he prepared the paperwork for filing.

At the same time, he had another scam going that needed one finishing touch. He had compiled several hundred credit card numbers from the Forbes list, and after testing many of them he'd determined which ones he could safely make charges on. He had set up a dummy corporation linked to his overseas accounts and had bought a $25,000 credit card press. By using an actual card in his credit card reader rather than punching in the account number, Abdallah could save himself one-half percent on the two percent merchant surcharge that banks levy on vendors who use mobile readers. The idea of paying that extra charge, even though it was on money he'd stolen, drove him to distraction. "I'm a perfectionist," he says. "I can't help that. Everything has to be perfect. I can't stand something getting over on me."

•

While his prey was frenetically robbing the richest people in America, Detective Fabozzi couldn't catch a break. Then, in early March 2001, after six months of near misses, an alert came in on a stolen credit card. It turned out that Abdallah had ordered a new hard drive on one of the credit card accounts the NYPD was tracking. Fabozzi had his squad intercept the package. Other detectives posing as UPS workers then delivered it to its destination, a Brooklyn garage. A mechanic working at the garage signed for the package, and Fabozzi had him arrested on the spot. The detective persuaded the mechanic to call the next person up the chain. He and five other plainclothes detectives huddled in the back of the garage and waited.

Abdallah was chatting amiably on a cell phone as he shuffled toward the garage. When he looked up and saw the men, he spun around and scuttled to his car. Using the remote control, he opened the doors, hopped in and started the ignition.

"That's him," Fabozzi cried.

As the cops shouted and drew their guns, Fabozzi sprinted to the side of the car. Then the former college basketball player jumped up and dived headfirst into the sun roof. He put Abdallah in a headlock and started to squeeze.

"Where you going?" he shouted. "You going somewhere?"

"Okay, okay. You got me."

Fabozzi handcuffed him and leaned against the car to catch his breath while the others searched the car. In the front seat, police found a copy of the Forbes issue devoted to the 400 list. When he saw the magazine, Fabozzi knew this was the suspect he had been tracking for six months. Operation CEO had its man.

•

As the federal authorities prepared their case and looked through the evidence, the dog-eared copy of Forbes proved to be the most damning, for it was one of the few things directly linking Abdallah to the crime. Next to each name on the richest Americans list, Abdallah had written the person's Social Security number, date of birth, address, bank information, bank account number and other personal details. A black portfolio contained a notebook listing all the fraudulent checks Abdallah had used in the past and a forged check that was about to be mailed to Merrill Lynch in a Fed Ex folder, with an application signed and filled out.

Abdallah pleaded guilty to 12 counts of fraud. He has not yet been sentenced. The likely range is 11 to 14 years, based on the severity of the crime, which prosecutors estimate at "in excess of $80 million," an amount representing the maximum the law accounts for. Abraham's older brother, Tony, also came under investigation and had his bank accounts frozen. Detectives believed the three brownstones he owns in Brooklyn had been purchased with Abraham's funds; the authorities were not able to prove this, however, and Tony was cleared.

During Abdallah's arraignment, Richard Reinhardt, the FBI fraud specialist who had been the team leader on three of Abdallah's previous cases, sat in the back row of the courtroom. When Abdallah shuffled in, the two men nodded in friendly recognition. Then the thief gave his statement to the judge. He said he was deeply sorry and had never intended to hurt anyone but suffered from a compulsion that drove him to steal identities. Reinhardt had heard this before, and though he says he once believed it, he no longer does. "His track record speaks for itself," Reinhardt says. "He has a history as an adult of committing these crimes, and in my opinion he tries to learn from his mistakes. Sure, he can't stop. This is what he does. It's who he is. Is it a compulsion? Maybe. But that doesn't make him any less responsible."

Reinhardt is now retired. I was able to contact him through the FBI, but he would not give me his phone number. "After dealing with Abraham and people like him for so many years, I have taken many serious steps in my retirement to make it hard to find me," he says. Another law enforcement figure who was significant in Abdallah's most recent case, the parole officer who took responsibility for him in Brooklyn--and to whom Abdallah reported on a weekly basis even as he ran large-scale frauds--has relocated to another jurisdiction. "Do me a favor," he says when I reach him. "Don't tell Abraham where I am, not even the state."

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The notion that Abdallah, despite getting caught, might have succeeded in stealing and then hiding a large sum of money struck prosecutors and others familiar with the case as eminently plausible. For his part, Abdallah has said that he told authorities the "location of every penny," except for "maybe $64,000 that I somehow lost track of."

Reinhardt, however, believes there may be a lot more to account for. "There was always a discrepancy between what you knew he took and what you could find," he says.

"It wouldn't surprise me if he were to have access to a lot of money when he gets out," says Fabozzi. "He's so good at creating identities that he could have an account in, let's say, the Isle of Man, with your name and your Social Security number, and as long as it hasn't defaulted and it's not interest-bearing, you'll never know about it. So he could have, say, $5 million sitting in an account under your name, Mark Boal, and you'd never know. Never. It would just sit there. Then when he gets out, it's his. How could we possibly find that?"

During my last interview with Abdallah, I mention Fabozzi's scenario. If he had stashed $10 million or $20 million in a foreign bank, he probably wouldn't tell anyone, would he?

Abdallah looks at me as if I'm crazy. "Probably not," he says with a chuckle.

"They make it so easy," he says. "They just tell you whatever you want to know. So many customers call in for information, and they don't want to alienate them, so they try to please them. If you don't answer one question, they say, 'Oh, don't worry about it. What is your Social Security number? What is your date of birth? What is your address?' Like you can't get that information."

We talk for a few more minutes about his life in prison, and he volunteers that he is taking antidepressants to help him cope with stress. Then, as I get up to leave, he offers his hand and says, "Yeah, I could have had a billion." Even with the drugs' dulling effects, in his eye I detect a glint that suggests he is not quite ready to retire.

Epilogue: Never Going to Happen

In May 2001, a couple of months after capturing Abdallah, Fabozzi testified about the case before a congressional committee on the misuse of Social Security numbers. Since then, President Bush has signed the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act, and this may act as a deterrent against casual thieves. The vulnerabilities in the system, according to experts, remain the same as they were in 2001.

Fabozzi has kept a copy of the testimony he read that year. Sitting in his office now, three years later, he reads part of it aloud. "Entities that have access to a consumer's personal identifying information should be strictly accountable as to who they provide such information," he reads, then stops midsentence. "Well, that's never going to happen," he says.

He scans the list of recommendations and shakes his head. "Here's a good one," he says. " 'The posting of Social Security numbers on the Internet should be prohibited.' Well, that's never going to happen either."

Fabozzi shrugs his shoulders. "There really is no protection against this stuff."

He decided he would steal the financial soul of Andrew McKelvey, worth an estimated $2.1 billion.