The world’s most notorious hacker was a hack.
A former cabdriver, Marcel Lazarus Lehel — known as Guccifer — was busted in his Romanian village Wednesday with the help of the US Secret Service.
Guccifer became infamous on the Web by leaking self-portraits of former President George W. Bush, as well as e-mails between Colin Powell and a 30-years-younger Romanian female diplomat that prompted the former secretary of state to deny he was having an affair.
Lehel, 40, was tracked down to the village of Paulis, where he lived with his wife and kindergarten-age daughter and rarely went outside.
“I heard he spent all day at the computer,” the town’s mayor, Peter Nicoara, told the newspaper Adevarul.
Two weeks ago, the Web site The Smoking Gun, which posted much of Guccifer’s hacked material, said his victims included show-biz figures such as Steve Martin, Rupert Everett and Mariel Hemingway, former Nixon White House figure John Dean, three members of the House of Lords, authors Candace (“Sex and the City”) Bushnell and Kitty Kelley, editor Tina Brown and the director of Romania’s domestic intelligence service, George-Cristian Maior.