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you’re not going to be the CEO and you didn’t put money in?” Newlin asked. “That’s the way it is,” Fanning told him. “I just said, ‘I’m not going to waste my time,’” Newlin recalled.

Possibly the best choice of all for Napster would have been another Parker-Perrelli connection, engineers Scott and Mike Shinn. The Shinns were northern Virginia brothers in their late twenties who always worked as a team, from their internship at the White House, where they were in the same orientation group as Monica Lewinsky, to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where they worked on the well-regarded EDGAR system for putting SEC documents online. The Shinns began with the same sort of hacker/security background as Jordan Ritter, but they reached a bigger league at a company called WheelGroup Corp., based in San Antonio. WheelGroup gained widespread attention in early 1997, when it appeared on the cover of Fortune.

The magazine had heard WheelGroup executives boasting that its white-hat hackers could break into any corporate system in a day, then teach the company how to protect itself. To test the claim, Fortune found a large New York company that was proud of its computer security and that agreed to serve as a guinea pig as long as it was never identified and an auditor made sure secrets weren’t stolen. The magazine then chronicled how WheelGroup’s employees, many of them former information-warfare specialists for the government, used public data about the company’s network structure and a wardialer program like that released by w00w00’s Matt Conover to go around the company’s $25,000 firewall. WheelGroup got in through a fax server and then broke into the company’s tax department, where an employee had a popular remote-access program running on his computer. As a crowning touch, the hackers sent an e-mail to a division president that appeared to come from his deputy, suggesting a $5,000 bonus for the employee who had approved the WheelGroup project.

Basking in the publicity, WheelGroup was bought the next year by Cisco Systems for $124 million, making millionaires out of many of the firm’s seventy-five employees, including the brothers Shinn. Cisco, the largest maker of networking gear, was pressuring the Shinns to abandon Virginia for San Antonio, and the brothers were looking for an excuse not to move. They knew Perrelli from UUNet’s interactions with Cisco,