Kingpin 2.0?

Chris had acted like a jackass on the first day she met him, she recalls. First, he lied about his age, telling her he was nineteen, when he was really two years younger. Then, after he installed a CD player in her Grand Prix, she agreed to give him a ride, only to end up scolding him for shooting paint balls out the window.

Chris Smith with Anita and family in happier days.

Still, Anita missed Chris. He brought out her silly side. And even though their marriage was full of drama—she says they had both messed around with other people before—he was a good father to the kids. Plus, she loved the gifts he gave her, including her Mercedes AMG convertible. And he set her up with a limo company to run, though he didn’t understand why she wanted to work when she didn’t have to. And that baby face of his was actually really cute. Most of all, Anita says, she considered Chris a genius—as do most people who have spent any time around him (even the feds working his case). He was weird, possessive, and paranoid, but for as long as she’d known him, he could do things with gadgets and computers that nobody else could do—things nobody else could even understand.

So when he called her cell phone from the resort on Turks and Caicos in June 2005, she picked up, even though the new guy was with her in the room. She was excited to hear Chris’s voice, though she could hear his new girlfriend—the stripper—crying in the background. “I’m coming home, Anita,” Chris said. “I love you.”

When FBI agent George Kyrilis was tipped off that Smith was coming home to save his marriage, he was amused. In the month since Smith’s release, Smith had violated the judge’s order and was found in contempt of court. According to Kyrilis, Smith, while on “vacation,” had withdrawn $2,000 from one of his frozen bank accounts and had set up two new websites to sell pharmaceuticals. Both his wife and his girlfriend (and Smith’s bodyguard and others) separately had flown to Turks and Caicos with thousands in cash in apparent seed money. Kyrilis considered Smith a brazen thug, but every time Chris did something sketchy, it took agents hours of computer research to connect it to the guy—hours of wading through cyberspace, deciphering cryptic instant-message conversations, trying to match Internet service providers and screen names with real people and real addresses.

When agents arrested Smith at the Lindbergh Terminal baggage carousel around midnight on July 1, 2005, Kyrilis smiled when Chris asked, “You don’t like me very much, do you”

“Actually, no,” Kyrilis replied. “Nothing personal, but no.”

“Why” Smith wanted to know.

“Because you’re making me work too hard, Chris. You’re making me work too damn hard.”

Whether you’re Agent Kyrilis and consider Smith a supervillain or Anita and think he’s a superhero, most people who know him agree that when it comes to computers, he possesses a superpower. And as with all superpowers, Smith’s power comes with a freaky origin story.

Smith is a high school dropout who left Holy Angels Academy three weeks before graduation. Though he’d received terrible marks in English and history, when it came to math and computer science, he says he was “way smarter than the teachers.” He built his own servers, networks, and advanced routing systems while still in school and taught himself difficult computer operating-system languages such as C++ and Perl.

As a budding entrepreneur, he modeled himself after his father, Scott, whose most successful business, Diaper Deck, was the first company to make the fold-down changing tables found in public restrooms. In the 1970s, Scott was a cocky ski instructor in the sporting goods business and then jumped into restaurants. In 1975, he refurbished the old Forum cafeteria and opened Scottie’s, Minneapolis’s classiest discotheque. When he was forced to shut it down during construction of City Center in 1980, he sued the construction company for damages and won a lawsuit that required it to rebuild Scottie’s piece by piece in the new mall. While he waited for all 330,000 pieces to be put back together, he bought Schieks, long a fixture (now a strip club) on 4th Street downtown. Then, above Schieks, he created Graffitti’s, a dance club capitalizing on the newfound fascination with the urban art form. Scott was killing it—besides the businesses, he owned two houses and was married to Candace, a smokin’ blond flight attendant for North Central Airlines. After four years of marriage, they started a family—Chris was born in 1980 and Corbin, Chris’s sister, in 1984.

Scott planned to expand Graffitti’s into the nation’s top college markets, beginning with Tempe, Arizona, home of Arizona State, named America’s number-one party school by Playboy. He was flying frequently between the Twin Cities and Tempe and bought a house for Candace and the kids on the ninth hole of a Tempe golf course.