Holed up in his bedroom, his face lit by the screen's glow, Johnny felt like a magician, in control of everything he touched.
By the time he was a teen, he was a regular on virtual gaming bulletin boards, which started out free but eventually began to charge. That's when a hacker was born. Soon enough, young Johnny began plugging in various user names and passwords until he cracked the codes and gained entry, slipping past the virtual cashier directly onto the boards.
It was his first taste of the exhilaration that comes from beating a system. And one of the few ways he ever did it illegally. He may have had an outlaw streak in him, he realized early, but he wasn't an outlaw.
"We were cut from the same rock of ethics, so to speak," said Chris Cooper, Johnny's best bud in middle school. "We were decent kids; we didn't get into a whole lot of trouble.
"The bond for John and I wasn't so much computers. The bond for John and I was the type of people we were."
And that type was Christian.
Turning away
Johnny's family bounced around the Baltimore area, living in Eldersburg, Glen Burnie, Arbutus and Randallstown. An only child, his constants were church and doting parents, who - he'll readily tell you - spoiled him just shy of rotten.
He was raised Baptist, with a smattering of Presbyterian. He was taught to be God-fearing, to honor the church and to emulate its leaders, according to his parents.
And he was OK with most of it, except this: Churchgoers, to youthful Johnny, just weren't cool. And if there's one thing he wanted to be, it was cool. They didn't dress right, they separated themselves from the mainstream, and they talked about faith as casually as the weather.
Try that in high school, and your lot will get 10 times worse, thought Johnny. He was far more interested in crafting an image as a fringe skater kid, with red light bulbs in his bedroom, big hair and a thing for Depeche Mode.
So, in typical teenager fashion, he got snide and judgmental, dismissing Christians as "culturally and socially inept."
Nevertheless, his parents insisted on his continued presence in church; what they couldn't do is keep his mind from wandering to less spiritual pursuits, namely parties, cars and girls.
Despite lackluster grades, Johnny made it out of high school with his diploma in 1989. He got a job as a computer operator at Catonsville Community College, took a few classes, got bored and dropped out.
