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have much,” she said. “He didn’t get a lot of things that people get who come from money.”

She saw that Shawn was motivated, and she turned to the person she knew best who could be a mentor of sorts, her business-minded brother John. John Fanning gave Shawn money for each A he brought home, and there were many. And he bought Shawn his first computer, an Apple Macintosh the Verriers could never have afforded. Shawn took to it immediately. Often he would be on the machine doing homework or chatting over the Internet through the evening. Every hour he typed, the radio blared. “I always knew from an early age he was going to accomplish things,” Coleen said. Given her son’s way of working, “it doesn’t strike me as strange he would figure out a way to have music on computers.”

John Fanning bought other presents for his nephew too. Nothing was more important than the car—a dark purple BMW Z3 that ensured Shawn made an impression at Harwich High. “He was a nice kid. Everybody liked him,” said Tim Jamoulis, who played on the tennis team with Shawn. History teacher Richard Besciak taught Shawn in homeroom for all four years and remembered Shawn’s unusual ability to focus intently on the task at hand. “A lot of kids can tune out, but he was right on track,” Besciak said. “He was an A student without trying. He was a nice, generous, levelheaded young man.” Harwich High had only about a hundred students in each grade, but around Shawn’s time, there were several promising computer students. After Shawn became one of them, everything else fell by the wayside. “Once I started getting into programming, I pretty much quit all sports,” Shawn said. A fellow hacker at the school said that Shawn’s work on the machines “really seemed to consume him. There were those who were doing it just as a hobby, for games, or to cheat in school. Shawn went through that phase, but it was just a starting point. He was quickly beyond that, doing much more sophisticated things.”

When Shawn was seventeen, John Fanning located Joe Rando on the Internet and asked his sister Coleen if she wanted Shawn to meet his biological father, who still lived in the area. Coleen had no hard feelings about Rando and had told Shawn the truth when he was seven, so she agreed immediately. “I knew Shawn had to get to know him. He was at

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