Category: Memoir / Cybersecurity / Investigative Narrative
From COERCION / WHITE SITES — A Memoir by LeRoy Nellis
I DON’T FUCKING LOSE.
That mantra didn’t start in a jail cell. It started in a dim bedroom lit by a flickering monitor, dot-matrix paper spooling onto the carpet like a magician’s endless scarf. The smell was solder and ozone — the stale funk of a Commodore 64 running hot at two in the morning.
I was thirteen, skinny as a rail and wired like caffeine. Everyone else wanted BMX bikes and girlfriends. I wanted access. Okay, let’s be honest — I wanted a girlfriend too, but I was too nerdy to pull that off.
My first “hack,” if you could call it that, was stumbling across a modem number that dialed me into a bulletin board system. One minute I was a kid punching keys. The next I was inside somebody’s hidden library where files and numbers lived like buried treasure.
That was my drug.
Every menu option was a new high. Every beep of the modem was a pulse in my veins. The BBS networks became my playground, my dojo, my religion.
And then I slipped deeper.
Somewhere in that blur of sleepless nights, I found myself inside systems that were never meant for a kid with shaky hands and acne. AS400 mainframes — digital temples tied to Ivy League universities and government research labs. One crack in the wall and suddenly I was staring at directories listing machines across the entire country.
Phone numbers. Hostnames. Administrator contacts.
It was like someone had left the master Rolodex of America’s networks sitting open.
So I printed it.
Jesus, did I print it.
The dot-matrix screamed through an entire box of tractor-feed paper. Line after line hammered onto the floor until my room looked like a ticker-tape parade.
I stacked the pages into cardboard boxes and rifled through them like a miser counting gold.
It was absurd.
And it was intoxicating.
I wasn’t stealing.
I wasn’t vandalizing.
I was mapping.
Cartography of the forbidden.
If you want to know what I was like at that age, go watch WarGames. That kid on the screen wasn’t me — but he might as well have been my reflection.
Curious.
Reckless.
Smart enough to reach where I shouldn’t.
Dumb enough to believe I was invisible.
I burned through three Commodore 64s before admitting they weren’t built to survive my obsession. Each one fried. Each one replaced. Each one another step forward.
That’s where the foundation was poured.
Before satellites. Before smuggling hardware across borders. Before FBI agents stood in plain clothes at my demos.
It was just me and the printer.
A kid clawing his way into systems bigger than himself, teaching his brain to think in networks instead of sidewalks.
And without realizing it, I was carving a lesson into my bones:
Curiosity becomes capability.
Capability becomes attention.
And attention — sooner or later — becomes a file with your name on it.
WHITE HAT BY DAY, BLACK HAT BY NIGHT
Vegas has a way of splitting a man in half.
By daylight I was the polished corporate soldier — Network Security Engineer, Fortune 500 badge hanging from a lanyard, hotel suite on the company’s dime. The guy executives pointed at and said, “He’s making sure we’re safe.”
White hat. Corporate clean. That’s who I was on paper.
But you don’t catch wolves by reading fairy tales.
You catch wolves by running with them.
And Vegas is where the wolves gather.
The week started with Black Hat — khaki pants, vendor booths, overpriced lattes, and PowerPoint decks dense enough to kill a man.
The alphabet agencies filled the ballroom: FBI, NSA, NCIS, DHS. All the letters in the soup sitting there pretending they were ahead of the curve while hackers stood on stage explaining the very vulnerabilities those agencies were supposed to defend.
The irony could choke you.
Wolves teaching shepherds how to repair the fence.
Then the weekend arrived.
DEF CON.
That’s when the masks came off.
Corporate badges flipped over and hacker handles appeared.
Inside those rooms, your alias mattered more than your legal name.
Reputation wasn’t earned on résumés.
It was earned in real time.
On the floor.
In front of hundreds of watching eyes.
The hack-offs felt like digital cage fights. Capture-the-Flag battles where code flew like punches. Kids barely old enough to shave stood elbow-to-elbow with gray-bearded veterans who’d been writing code since ARPANET was a rumor.
Everyone hungry.
Everyone watching.
And when someone shouted your handle across the room — when hundreds of heads turned to look at you — the adrenaline was stronger than anything sold on the Strip.
I wasn’t dropping world-ending zero-days back then. I was a scrappy script kiddie with hustle, stitching together other people’s exploits and making them dance under neon lights.
But even small tricks matter.
Break the right protocol at the right moment.
Demo something clever.
Suddenly people know your name.
And the feds?
They were always there.
Not uniforms. Not badges.
Plain clothes.
Haircuts just a little too clean.
Smiles that never quite reached their eyes.
They lingered at the edges of the room, scribbling notes.
Watching.
Cataloging.
Who made noise.
Who flipped their badge.
Who might become useful.
Or dangerous.
Vegas split my life in two.
White hat by day.
Black hat by night.
Every badge flip was another dot on a map I didn’t even know was being drawn.
A map that, years later, would be called a dossier.
End of Chapter 5
LeRoy Nellis 