Albert Gonzalez, the suspected TJX hacker who called his credit card stealing venture, "Operation Get Rich or Die Trying", once complained after his counting machine broke that he had to count $340,000 worth of stolen $20 bills manually. He had even spent $75,000 on his own birthday party one time. He was a hacking kingpin who lived in criminal excess and affluence.

In contrast, a programmer of Gonzalez's asserts that he didn't earn a penny out of the operation's ill-gotten wealth even as the architect of the entire venture lived high off the stolen riches. In fact, twenty-five-year-old Stephen Watt remains jobless and penniless up until now, his career completely ruined as he awaits sentencing for a piece of programming he created for his friend.

This sob story and many other pieces of new information have surfaced in court documents submitted for the case of Watt, who says he was an inconsequential accomplice in what authorities are now calling the biggest identity theft case in America's cyber security history. The files include a counter-argument from the legal team representing Watt, and three years of court supervision for the New Yorker.

The seven-foot software developer who had a job at Morgan Stanley at the time the cyber attack occurred pleaded guilty last December for designing a sniffing program named "blabla" that Gonzalez and several others supposedly employed to pilfer millions of debit and credit card numbers from TJX and many other corporations.

Michael Farkas, Watt's lawyer, says that his client has long accepted his responsibility for inadvertently assisting people that he knew would commit crime with his program. However, Watt is also shocked and upset by the government's insistence to turn him into a pariah and a scapegoat for the incident.

Farkas insists that Watt was a secondary factor in the whole credit card stealing scheme, driven by friendship and intellectual curiosity instead of illegal financial gain. The attorney is presently seeking a probation sentence for the software designer, who last month was free on bail.

Watt was purportedly unaware of what the sniffer was supposed to be used for, and he was the only one of Gonzalez's cronies and accomplices who had a bright future and a budding career ahead of him. Prosecutors, on the other hand, paint a different picture through their 300 pages worth of chat logs that contained the pair's misadventures in hacking, drugs, and sex.