I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI

David Thomas loves movies. He took his online nickname -- "El Mariachi" -- from a Hollywood flick, and his conversation is occasionally peppered with dialogue from Scarface and other favorite films. He says he once legally changed his name to "Darius Jedburgh," a character from a popular old BBC miniseries called Edge of Darkness. In the series, Jedburgh is a CIA operative from Texas.

By the time David Thomas eased his Cadillac into the parking lot of an office complex in Issaquah, Washington, he already suspected the police were on to him.

An empty Crown Victoria in one of the parking spaces confirmed it. "That's heat right there," he told his two passengers -- 29-year-old girlfriend Bridget Trevino, and his crime partner Kim Marvin Taylor, a balding, middle-aged master of fake identities he'd met on the internet.

It was November 2002, and Thomas, then a 44-year-old Texan, was in Washington to collect more than $30,000 in merchandise that a Ukrainian known as "Big Buyer" ordered from Outpost.com with stolen credit card numbers. His job was to collect the goods from a mail drop, fence them on eBay and wire the money to Russia, pocketing 40 percent of the take before moving to another city to repeat the scam.

But things didn't go as planned.