LOS ANGELES, CA --- A few days after Christmas I answered my ringing telephone, heard the familiar automated voice of a collect call from a correctional facility and was surprised when it wasn't Kevin Mitnick.

"They threw Kevin in the hole on Thursday," said Saul Moore, an inmate at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center. "They told him it's because he's being investigated as a security risk. He's been told he may be a danger to the institution. He may have told someone something about using its computers."

Moore said the authorities took Mitnick's pants, magazines and books. "He's been sitting in his cell in his underwear." I asked Moore how he knew all of this. "The vents," he explained. "We can talk to each other."

Mitnick phoned on New Year's Day. "I was at the library at 10:30 a.m. on Friday," he began almost immediately, giving me the rundown. "At 10:45 a.m. I arrived at my cell. They wouldn't let me into my unit. I saw one of the officers I know. He said, 'You're in serious shit, you're going to the hole.'"

Mitnick wasn't sure what it was all about. A guard was stuffing his legal papers, magazines and books into a big plastic bag. He speculated they might want to peek at his legal defense.

"Is it because of the tuna fish?" Mitnick asked. The hacker didn't eat much of the prison food and had hoarded 74 cans of tuna in his cell.

"No. I can't tell you," he says the guard replied. As the guards took Mitnick away he yelled out his attorney's number to an inmate who wrote it down. Mitnick says a guard snatched the number out of the inmate's hands. Nor would the guards permit Mitnick to call his attorney.

Mitnick was searched, handcuffed and taken up to 8 North, the solitary confinement unit of the prison. None of the guards would tell him what was going on. They locked him in what's called a four point cell. "It's where they put the unruly inmates. They strap you to a metal table," recalled Mitnick. "I was in fear. They stripped me and left me nude."

Mitnick hollered his attorney's number through the "Intervent," in the hope that a fellow inmate would phone his attorney and family and get help. An hour later Mitnick, "freezing" in his air conditioned cell, was thrown a pair of jockey shorts. Eventually he was moved to another cell. Mitnick says he was told he was "being investigated as a security threat," but he wondered whether the government was "playing a game."

Sometime after 5:00 p.m., Mitnick said he was served with an administrative detention paper that said he was under investigation for a "security concern." Mitnick was asked to sign the document, acknowledging his ownership of the confiscated material: 16 manila envelopes containing his legal papers and Internet searches, magazines and articles on amateur radio, electronics and computers, his Walkman, watch and cans of tuna.

About ten hours after Mitnick was thrown into solitary, Michelle Caswell, an associate in Mitnick's attorney's firm, arrived. The Intervent had worked. Prison officials provided the hacker with a t-shirt and prison jumpsuit for the visit. Caswell demanded that Mitnick be given a tooth brush and a blanket. She was getting conflicting stories about why Mitnick had been placed in solitary. One guard told her it was because of the cans of tuna in his cell; another said it was because of secrets that Mitnick had learned and the information in his cell.

Mitnick spent four days in solitary confinement. When he got out he still wasn't sure what had prompted the raid and his solitary confinement. Much of the material confiscated was Internet printouts friends had sent him, publicly available material. "I'd still like to get to the bottom of why they raided my cell," Mitnick told me angrily, without any of the humor I'd once heard in his voice.. "Was this to get my (legal) notes or a f___ you treatment?"

In the days following his release Mitnick heard a new theory about why he was punished. "Now they are saying that I had too much legal material in my cell. They told me it was because of my notes on other hacker cases, all the 2600 issues, the Neidorf (911) case. I was highlighting all that for my attorney."

Mitnick's attorney met with the associate warden and was finally told why the hacker was stripped, searched and thrown in solitary. "They believed I had the knowledge or the know how to modify a normal Walkman radio to be a transmitter," Mitnick said. The associate warden told Mitnick's attorney that prison authorities raised the scenario that "Mitnick might covertly place the supposed modified Walkman in their offices and bug prison officials."

Far fetched was how Mitnick described the authorities' conspiracy theory. "It was ludicrous, I had no soldering iron or the other components that would be necessary (to modify the Walkman into a transmitter)," he said. Besides, Mitnick pointed out, "I'm locked in the cell block. How am I going to place the transmitter in their offices?" In addition, no modified Walkman was found.

If they really believed he wanted to bug them, Mitnick postulated, why wouldn't he just smuggle in a common eavesdropping bug. "If you want a pizza, do you smuggle in the flour and the tomatoes or smuggle in a pizza?" Mitnick asked.

When Mitnick's legal materials were finally returned, (but not his Internet printouts and other possessions) the hacker noticed an extra staple hole on his most confidential document, the chronology of facts he had prepared for his attorney. "It's very suspicious," said Mitnick. I still don't know to this day whether they copied my legal material."