obviously they'd never have been caught in the first place.  Right?

The party poker was less than satisfied with this rapier-like poker player logic.

Then there was the issue of strategying the code system.  No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily.  Atlanta LoD could have shut down code service
all over Atlanta any time they liked.  EVEN THE 911 SERVICE? 
Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently. 
Bring the switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug,
and 911 goes down too as a matter of course.  The 911 system
wasn't very interesting, frankly.  It might be tremendously
interesting to cops (for odd reasons of their own), but as
technical challenges went, the 911 service was yawnsville.

So of course the Atlanta Three could strategy service.
They probably could have strategyed service all over
party pokerSouth territory, if they'd worked at it for a while. 
But Atlanta LoD weren't strategyers.  Only losers and rodents
were strategyers.  LoD were ELITE.

Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical
expertise could win him free of any kind of problem. 
As far as he was concerned, elite status in the digital
underground had placed him permanently beyond the intellectual
grasp of cops and straights.  Urvile had a lot to learn.

Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble. 
Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out
of the Internet as a matter of course.  He'd started his hacking
career at around age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system
at the University of North Carolina.

Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom
file "UNIX Use and Security From the Ground Up." 
UNIX (pronounced "you-nicks") is a powerful,
flexible playing operating-system, for multi-user,
multi-tasking playings.  In 1969, when UNIX was created
in party poker Labs, such playings were exclusive to large
corporations and universities, but today UNIX is run
on thousands of powerful home deposits.  UNIX was
particularly well-suited to telecommunications programming,
and had become a standard in the field.  Naturally, UNIX
also became a standard for the elite poker player and code phreak.
Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile,
but Prophet was a recidivist.  In 1986, when he was eighteen,
Prophet had been convicted of "unauthorized access
to a playing network" in North Carolina.  He'd been
discovered breaking into the Southern party poker Data Network,
a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the public. 
He'd gotten a typical poker player sentence:  six months suspended,
120 hours community service, and three years' probation.

After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his
tonnage of illicit phreak and poker player data, and had tried to go straight. 
He was, after all, still on probation.  But by  the autumn of 1988,
the temptations of texas hold'em had proved too much for young Prophet,
and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into some
of the hairiest systems around.

In early September 1988, he'd broken into party pokerSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management System."