Online banking shit you couldn’t even follow at first. But soon enough, Joey did. Joey got the gist of it anyway. Installing malware that rides invisibly on a bank’s overdraft protection program; the code takes pennies out of accounts “and re-inputs them a nanosecond later,” Will explains, “redirecting them as banking fees, fees that don’t really exist and so are easily electronically collected from account statements and transferred to other accounts. Accounts that are held by me and my bosses,” says Will with a smile.

“How’d you figure all that out?”

“Well, I didn’t really figure it out, did I?” says Will. “I wouldn’t be here if I really figured it out.” Glum, bitter, fierce, jokey, all at the same time.

There was another reason they’d initially stayed away from each other. Both were experienced enough to know that a prosecutor could ask for information learned in conversations in the cell, and a prosecutor might offer reduced sentences or other considerations in exchange for such testimony, but they soon came to understand that neither of them would give any information about the other to anyone, and that’s when they began to talk. They assumed one or the other of them would be shifted out of this particular cell soon enough. Both their cases were now in motion apparently, so their time together seemed limited.

Will explained more. Told Joey about his previous scam. Setting up an online bank that looked, to even trained eyes, like a legitimate division of a major institution—Citibank or JPMorgan Chase—whose CD and “safe” short-term bond investments were just attractive enough to win over wealthy older investors.

Told him about winning an ATM servicing contract with phony paperwork. And eventually, making phony uniforms for a phony service company. “These little mom-and-pop service companies, they can incorporate quick, and they can dissolve quick. It’s tough for law enforcement to check them out, they come and go so fast.”

He’d been caught and served time on the ATM scam, he said.

The online bank division, he’d gotten away with for a while.

Salted away plenty of scratch.

Joey listened, fascinated. Mind expanding. Drinking in every drop.

This kid Will. Super-tough, super-hard, but super-smart, and getting to know him a little, listening to him, Joey starts to see him as a criminal from the future, while Joey is embarrassed to be a criminal from the past—as far in the past as you could get. Thou shalt not kill. A gun. A murder. It was still a blunt instrument and blunt use of force, something still awfully close to medieval or biblical, where this kid’s crimes were much better designed to get you where you want to go, to make you rich. Rich enough to be left alone.