Mitnick Indicted on Phone Fraud : Crime: Computer hacker is charged in Raleigh, N. C., but is likely to be returned to California for trial.

Computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, whose high-profile arrest last month followed a nationwide electronic manhunt, was indicted Thursday in North Carolina on 23 counts of cellular phone fraud.

Mitnick, 31, who grew up in North Hills, was charged with one count of possessing equipment capable of cloning cellular phones, one count of possessing 15 or more stolen cellular phone numbers, and 21 counts of using cloned phones.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John Bowler said each count carries a 20-year maximum prison term.

As serious as these charges are, they concern only Mitnick’s alleged activities during the few weeks he was in the Raleigh, N.C., area before his capture, said Assistant U.S. Atty. David Schindler in Los Angeles.

“They do not purport to address the major allegations of (the rest of) the investigation,” Schindler said.

Mitnick, who once went by the nickname Condor in homage to a favorite movie about a technical wizard who taunted and eluded federal agents, was on the run more than two years after the FBI showed up at the Calabasas private investigations firm to question him about hacking.

During his flight, he is believed to have spent time in Colorado and Seattle. In fact, he narrowly escaped agents in Seattle, abandoning his computer and other sophisticated equipment in an apartment shortly before a police raid.

Separate criminal investigations are going on in each of the areas where he lived during his flight. Last week, prosecutors from those districts met in San Diego to decide how to proceed against Mitnick.

Mitnick wants to be tried in California, said his attorney, John Yzurdiaga. “Eventually, we’re going to wind up here,” he predicted. “That’s what we want and what we expect.”

Although the Department of Justice has refused to comment publicly, there are growing indications he will be returned to California for trial. Arrangements are under way to bring him out to Los Angeles at the end of this month for an unspecified purpose.

Yzurdiaga said his client, whose phone privileges are limited out of concern for the technological threat he is believed to pose, even behind bars, is “doing OK” in prison.

As far as the legal process goes, Yzurdiaga said he told his client what to expect.

“That there will be indictments in North Carolina and California will be no surprise to him,” he said.

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Mitnick’s hacking career began as a student at Monroe High School, where he broke into the Los Angeles Unified School District’s computers. Later, he broke into North American Air Defense Command computers.

But his big mistake was to allegedly attack a computer belonging to a computer software security expert named Tsutomu Shimomura on Christmas Day last year. Afterward, Shimomura assembled his own team to find the intruder. Working with the FBI, Shimomura tracked Mitnick to Raleigh last month.

Authorities said they confiscated equipment used to clone cellular telephones. Cellular phones are cloned by using a computer terminal and other equipment to reprogram the phone’s number with a stolen number.