Monday March 21,1994 Vol. CXXII, No. 46
Weather
Clouds will covcr the sky for most of the day, clearing a little bit by the afternoon. The temperature will reach a high in the 80s and drop ot a low in the 60s.
Women of Troy in Sweet 16
USC's women's basketball team advanced to the NCAA Mideast regional semifinals with a 76-72 win over George Washington at the Sports Arena. Lisa Leslie scored 23 points.
Daily Trojan: Due to technical difficulties ...
Today's Daily Trojan contains only a few stories and advertising pages as a result of a malfunction of the processing system.
We apologize to our readers and advertisers, and hope to re-establish full production soon.
Liz Washburn Editor
Newspaper
the Universit
Southern California
Gangsters hit info highway
Hacked voice mail accounts carry boasts, threats
By Scott Arenson Assistant City Editor
Using pirated voice mail pager numbers, Los Angeles area gang members are now battling for turf on the information superhighway.
Officials at Pagenet, America's largest pager company, confirmed Friday that gang members have been hacking into customers' voice mail accounts and establishing "gangster lines" on which they broadcast messages about murders, drive-by shootings and drug deals.
Calls monitored by Daily Trojan staff revealed that gangster line or "g-line" callers include the Bloods and Crips, and many are from gangs surrounding the university's campus.
After listening to messages recorded by the Daily Trojan, Sgt. Lee Mims, head of the l.os Angeles Police Department South Bureau Community Resource Against Street Hoodlums unit, or CRASH unit, confirmed that the messages were left by local gang members.
He was previously unaware of "gangster lines" but was not
surprised to learn that they exist.
Officer Steve Carillo of the LAI’D 77th Division CRASH unit said that he has known about the gangster lines for four or five months, but said it was difficult to monitor the lines because the numbers change so rapidly.
With a rap beat in the background, this was one message: "Like I said before, it's a I’VRU thing, CK187 all motherfucking day, let a dirt dog ride this thing to the motherfucking end, I'm not your friend, so get that through your motherfucking head, before you end up dead."
By constantly changing and updating the greeting portion of voice mail accounts, gang members have established a communications network that allows them to warn other gang members about police, taunt rival gang members and to boast about murders they've committed — or will commit.
The gangster lines are used 24 hours a day and at times are so inundated with calls that the messages change every few seconds.
Another caller gave out his
street address and invited rival gang members to his house so he could shoot them with his "dock, 16-shot" (automatic handgun).
One caller left a message warning drug dealers on 103rd Street to "watch out for the pork (police)" and told them to stop making calls from the pay phones because police were nearby,
Once the gang members obtain a voice mail number, they distribute it to other gang members and advertise it on gangster lines. Callers will also leave messages asking gang members to leave messages giving out more gangster numbers.
Said Mims: "The more high tech they get, the more complex they can get with their crimes."
"When gang members first started using beepers, it presented a problem because they could make calls using numeric codes regarding police activities," Mims said.
Gangster lines could become a tool for police to determine gang members' alignments and may even allow police to make their own undercover gangster calls to
suspects involved in murders, Mims said.
The contents of the gangster lines are similar to a pirate radio station that gang members established to host gangster talk shows, Mims said.
When police monitored the talk shows, they heard gang members boasting of murders they had committed. As a result, Mims said, he was able to solve a murder case.
Pagenet Customer Service Manager Fidel Edwards said that the company "has known about the problem since it started," but refused to disclose when that was.
Kurt Theis, a Pagenet systems engineer, said that Pagenet monitors pager numbers with unusually high call volumes.
Once the company determines that a number is a gangster line, the number is disconnected and the legitimate customer is informed, Theis said.
Theis said the I’agenot \h working with the LAI’D computer fraud division and that there are court cases pending against voice mail hackers. However, Theis refused to discuss details regarding individual voice mail hacker cases, as did the LAPD.
Spielberg waits for tonight's word from Academy
By Alex Litvak Staff Writer
"There's no rules. There's a law of science. I don't believe there's a lot of cinema. Movies are dreams. They are daydreams you get bad grades over when not concentrating on school work. You grow up being a daydreamer like I did and someday you take those daydreams and turn them into ,.. something."
Diversions
_
The man who wrote those lines knows more about turning fantasies into realities than anyone else. A wizard from the magical land of movies, a wonderkind who before turning 36 made four of Hollywood's most successful pictures, he's known even by those who might not recognize the names of any other director. His name is Steven Spielberg.
Yet long before Spielberg the movie mogul and the master of revels, there was a boy named Steven — a shy, introverted daydreamer growing up in the middle-class suburbia of New Jersey and Arizona. It's from those days that Spielberg would later draw the inspiration for his films, for that unique mixture of wonder, hope, longing and the urgent need to be accepted.
"I used film to escape into the world of fantasy. I found 1 could
do anything or live anywhere via imagination, through movies," Spielberg said.
At 13, he made his first fully scripted film. Three years later, he had his first commercial triumph when his feature-length sci-fi extravaganza was shown in a local theater earning $100 profit. That's how it began.
Unable to get into USC film school, Spielberg enrolled in Cal State Long Beach, studying English. Told by his friends at Universal to make something more professional looking to show to studio executives, Spielberg produced a low-budget short, "Amblin." A frivolous little whimsy about a couple of hitchhikers, it was later dismissed by the director himself as a "Pepsi commercial." But it got him what he wanted — the attention of the industry and a seven-year contract to direct TV at Universal.
Very quickly Spielberg graduated from the series to movies of the week. The first of these, "Duel" proved to be a breakthrough. An off-beat tense tale about a traveling salesman who is hounded on a highway by a huge menacing truck, it became a cult success in the United States and was a big theatrical hit overseas, establishing Spielberg as one of the most promising young directors of the time. Several years later he would live up to these expectations and shatter box office records with his first mega hit, "Jaws." The rest, as
they say, is history.
It's hard to imagine where the American film industry would be today without visionaries like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. In a single bold stroke, "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" brought the audiences back into the theaters at a time when the onslaught of video threatened to wipe out the big-screen competition, revolutionizing almost every imaginable technological aspect of modern filmmaking, setting up new standards in the entertainment industry, ultimately taking their part in shaping the mentality of our generation.
"My films have touched people regardless of where they live and that's exciting," said Spielberg. "To reach out beyond the theater, to make a movie that lasts a little longer is probably the greatest thrill for the filmmaker."
Whether we realize or not, we have grown up with these modern fairy tales, with special effects sagas full of rolling boulders and shining starships, with the wide-eyed little alien creature named E.T. These images are part of our childhood -- they are part of us.
Indeed, success has an inborn tendency to breed resentment. Labeled as a juvenile escapist, denied the courtesy of even a single Academy Award, Spielberg has always been considered an entertainer, not an artist.
Spielberg directs in the summer smash hit, ’Jurassic Park.'
One can like or dislike Steven movies.
Spielberg, but there's one thing he deserves from friends and foes alike — respect. Backed up by the sheer power of his talent, he rose up from the suburban oblivion to become one of the most powerful creative figures in the contemporary American industry. Emotionally involving, kinetically charged, his films are the essential close encounter between the filmmaker and his audience, where childhood daydreams are transformed into concrete visual miracles called
Hollywood is not known for honoring the people who deserve it. But if the Academy Awards are truly a recognition by one's peers, then tonight the coveted golden statue will go to the man who has earned it more than once, who has helped to turn American audiences away from the television tubes and brought into the stagnating industry a long-forgotten sense of wonder, discovery and magic.
His name is Steven Spielberg.