DONNIE BRASCO

There are some obvious options available to the cyber thief. The two tried-and-tested methods are free music downloads and pornography. The sexual drive is one of the most powerful of all – it has to be, because in evolutionary terms finding a mate has often proved a hazardous business. We are prepared to take huge risks to satisfy our sexual desires, and computer-virus manufacturers were swift to grasp this. The promise of a pair of breasts is often all that is needed to tempt an unsuspecting user to press on a hyperlink that will download a destructive piece of malware onto his machine. If he’s lucky, he’ll actually be redirected to the picture, although that’s scant compensation for handing over all the secrets on his desktop to a faceless controller far away. Not by chance was one of the most successful viruses spread via email with the subject line ‘I Love You’.

While sales managers tend not to spread viruses, they are, like cyber thieves, accomplished engineers of the human soul. Their job is to convince potential customers to invest in items that are either unwanted or unnecessary. ‘To sell something you have to someone who wants it – that’s not business,’ the mobster king, Meyer Lansky once remarked. ‘But to sell something you don’t have to someone else who doesn’t want it – that is business.’ At the very least, sales managers can persuade customers to buy more expensive items. So when the recently minted Agent Keith Mularski was accepted into the infant Cyber Division of the FBI, he brought with him a prized asset – the ability to cajole, josh, empathise, exhort, inveigle and entice. For a cop, he was a very convincing criminal.

By the year 2000 Pittsburgh had been transformed. It had always benefited from huge philanthropic bequests. Stamped everywhere around town are the marks of Carnegie, Heinz and Mellon, collosi of America’s industrial surge on either side of the turn of the twentieth century. Part of the city’s reinvention after the collapse of manufacturing lay in its investment in computer science and technology at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), rated as one of the world’s top twenty higher-education establishments.

Founded by the towering Scottish-born industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, the university began as a technical school and merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in 1967. During the bleak years of the 1980s and early 1990s, the CMU studied the demise of Pittsburgh and researched ways of resuscitating it. The university was also well