by Nick Bilton
Portfolio/Penguin
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Nick Bilton
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bilton, Nick, author.
Title: American kingpin : the epic hunt for the criminal mastermind behind the Silk Road / Nick Bilton.
Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050581 (print) | LCCN 2017010337 (ebook) | ISBN 9781591848141 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698405738 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ulbrict, Ross, 1984- | Criminals--United States--Case studies. | Computer crimes--Investigation--United States--Case studies. | Black market--United States--Case studies. | Drug traffic--United States--Case studies. | Electronic commerce--United States--Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV6248.U45 B55 2017 (print) | LCC HV6248.U45 (ebook) | DDC 364.16/8092--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050581
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
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For my wife, Chrysta, and our sons, Somerset and Emerson.
I love all of you more than anything in this big, big world.
No man, for any considerable period,
can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
I did it for me.
I liked it.
I was good at it.
And I was really . . . I was alive.
—Walter White, aka Heisenberg, Breaking Bad
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Cast of Characters
PART I
1. The Pink Pill
2. Ross Ulbricht
3. Julia Vie
4. The Debate
5. Jared’s Khat
6. The Bonfire
7. The Silk Road
8. Ross the Farmer
9. Opening Day of the Silk Road
10. What Goes Up Must Come Down
11. The Gawker Article
12. A Bull’s-eye on My Back
13. Julia Tells Erica
14. What Have You Done?!
15. Jared and the Fifty-Ton Flamingo
16. From Austin to Australia
PART II
17. Carl Force’s Tomorrow
18. Variety Jones and the Serpent
19. Jared Goes Shopping
20. The Dread Pirate Roberts
21. Carl Force Is Born Again
22. “O Captain, My Captain”
23. Ross, Hanged or Home
24. Carl, Eladio, and Nob
25. Jared’s Chicago Versus Carl’s Baltimore
26. The Mutiny
27. A Billion Dollars?!
28. The Aspiring Billionaire in Costa Rica
29. Variety Jones Goes to Scotland
30. The Armory Opens
31. Ross Silences Julia
PART III
32. Chris Tarbell, FBI
33. Ross Arrives in San Francisco
34. Chris in the Pit
35. Batten Down the Hatches!
36. Jared’s Dead Ends
37. A Pirate in Dominica
38. Carl Likes DPR
39. Kidney for Sale!
40. The White House in Utah
41. Curtis Is Tortured
42. The First Murder
43. The FBI Joins the Hunt
44. Camping and the Ball
PART IV
45. Gary Alford, IRS
46. Life and Death on the Road
47. Gary’s Big Change
48. Ross Goes Underground
49. Carl Switches Teams
50. A Parking Ticket on the Internet
51. Tarbell Finds a Mistake
52. The Fake IDs, Part One
53. The Deconfliction Meeting
54. Jared Becomes Cirrus
55. Julia Is Saved! Hallelujah!
56. The Fake IDs, Part Two
57. Onward to Federal Plaza
58. Julia Comes to San Francisco
59. I Am God
60. The Phone Call
61. The Good-bye Party
PART V
62. The Pink Sunset
63. Carla Sophia
64. FeLiNa
65. Arrested
66. The Laptop
67. Ross Locked Up
68. United States of America v. Ross William Ulbricht
69. To Catch a Pirate
70. Sentencing
71. The Plural of Mongoose
72. The Museum
73. The Others
Photographs
Notes on Reporting
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
Author’s Note
My mother, who passed away in 2015 and who was a voracious reader, had a strange quirk when it came to books. She began every book by reading the last page first, then returning to the beginning. Every novel, for her, began at the end.
I tell this story because, for this book, I have decided to place the beginning—traditionally the preface, in which the author explains how the book was made—at the end.
In the “Notes on Reporting” I explain how I reported and wrote the pages you are about to read, detailing the millions of words and research, photos and videos, thousands of hours of reporting (including research from the incredible reporters Josh Bearman and Joshua Davis) that went into the creation of this book, and in doing so, I give away how the story ends. I hope reading about the reportage won’t ruin this epic tale for you, but it seems unnecessary to explain how a structure was built before you’ve had a chance to wander through its halls.
In the book, you will see quoted conversations between the Silk Road leader and employees of the site. These are verbatim chats. With the exception of illegible typos, any spelling errors or peculiarities in the text have been left as is to preserve the authenticity of the conversations.
With that, I promise all will be revealed at the end. It always is.
Cast of Characters
The Silk Road
The Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht)
Variety Jones, consigliere and mentor (Roger Thomas Clark)
Nob, drug dealer and henchman (Carl Force, DEA)
ChronicPain, forum moderator (Curtis Green, Spanish Fork, Utah)
Richard Bates, friend and programmer
OTHER SILK ROAD EMPLOYEES
SameSameButDifferent, Libertas, Inigo, Smedley
Law Enforcement
DHS, CHICAGO
Jared Der-Yeghiayan (undercover as “Cirrus” on the Silk Road)
MARCO POLO TASK FORCE
Carl Force, DEA, Baltimore (undercover as “Nob” on the Silk Road)
Mike McFarland, DHS, Baltimore
Shaun Bridges, Secret Service, Baltimore
FBI, NEW YORK CITY
Chris Tarbell
Thom Kiernan
Ilhwan Yum
IRS, NEW YORK CITY
Gary Alford
U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, NEW YORK CITY
Serrin Turner, assistant U.S. attorney
PART I
Chapter 1
THE PINK PILL
Pink.
A tiny pink pill with an etching of a squirrel on either side. Jared Der-Yeghiayan couldn’t take his eyes off it.
He stood in a windowless mail room, the Department of Homeland Security badge hanging from his neck illuminated by pulsing halogen lights above. Every thirty seconds, the sound of airplanes rumbled through the air outside. Jared looked like an adolescent with his oversize clothes, buzz cut, and guileless hazel eyes. “We’ve started to get a couple of them a week,” his colleague Mike, a burly Customs and Border Protection officer, said as he handed Jared the envelope that the pill had arrived in.
The envelope was white and square, with a single perforated stamp affixed to the top right corner. HIER ÖFFNEN, read the inside flap. Below those two words was the English translation, OPEN HERE. The recipient’s name, typed in black, read DAVID. The package was on its way to a house on West Newport Avenue in Chicago.
It was exactly what Jared had been waiting for since June.
The plane carrying the envelope, KLM flight 611, had landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport a few hours earlier after a four-thousand-mile journey from the Netherlands. As weary passengers stood up and stretched their arms and legs, baggage handlers twenty feet below them unloaded cargo from the belly of the Boeing 747. Suitcases of all shapes and sizes were ushered in one direction; forty or so blue buckets filled with international mail were sent in another.
Those blue tubs—nicknamed “scrubs” by airport employees—were driven across the tarmac to a prodigious mail storage and sorting facility fifteen minutes away. Their contents—letters to loved ones, business documents, and that white square envelope containing the peculiar pink pill—would pass through that building, past customs, and into the vast logistical arteries of the United States Postal Service. If everything went according to plan, as it did most of the time, that small envelope of drugs, and many like it, would just slip by unnoticed.
But not today. Not on October 5, 2011.
By late afternoon, Mike Weinthaler, a Customs and Border Protection officer, had begun his daily ritual of clocking in for work, pouring an atrocious cup of coffee, and popping open the blue scrubs to look for anything out of the ordinary: a package with a small bulge; return addresses that looked fake; the sound of plastic wrap inside a paper envelope; anything fishy at all. There was nothing scientific about it. There were no high-tech scanners or swabs testing for residue. After a decade in which e-mail had largely outmoded physical mail, the postal service’s budgets had been decimated. Fancy technology was a rare treat allocated to the investigation of large packages. And Chicago’s mail-sniffing dogs—Shadow and Rogue—came through only a couple of times a month. Instead, whoever was hunting through the scrubs simply reached a hand inside and followed their instincts.
Thirty minutes into his rummaging routine, the white square envelope caught Mike’s eye.
He held it up to the lights overhead. The address on the front had been typed, not written by hand. That was generally a telltale sign for customs agents that something was amiss. As Mike knew, addresses are usually typed only for business mail, not personal. The package also had a slight bump, which was suspicious, considering it came from the Netherlands. Mike grabbed an evidence folder and a 6051S seizure form that would allow him to legally open the envelope. Placing a knife in its belly, he gutted it like a fish, dumping out a plastic baggie with a tiny pink pill of ecstasy inside.
Mike had been working in the customs unit for two years and was fully aware that under normal circumstances no one in the federal government would give a flying fuck about one lousy pill. There was, as every government employee in Chicago knew, an unspoken rule that drug agents didn’t take on cases that involved fewer than a thousand pills. The U.S. Attorney’s Office would scoff at such an investigation. There were bigger busts to pursue.
But Mike had been given clear instructions by someone who was waiting for a pill just like this: Homeland Security agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan.
A few months prior, Mike had come across a similar piece of illicit mail on its way to Minneapolis. He had picked up the phone and called the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations office at the airport, half expecting that he would be laughed at or hung up on, as usual. But the HSI agent who answered was surprisingly receptive. At the time, Jared had been on the job for only two months and frankly didn’t know any better. “I can’t fly to Minneapolis to talk to a guy about one single pill,” Jared said. “So call me if you get something in my area, in Chicago. Then I can go over there and do a knock-and-talk.”
Four months later, when Mike found a pill destined for Chicago, Jared rushed over to see it. “Why do you want this?” Mike asked Jared. “All the other agents say no; people have been saying no to meth and heroin for years. And yet you want this one little pill?”
Jared knew very well that this could be nothing. Maybe an idiot kid in the Netherlands was sending a few friends some MDMA. But he also wondered why one single pill had been sent on such a long journey and how the people who mailed such small packages of drugs knew the recipients they were sending them to. Something about it felt peculiar. “There may be something else to this,” Jared told Mike as he took the envelope. He would need it to show his “babysitter.”
Every newbie agent in HSI was assigned one—a training officer—during their first year. A more seasoned officer who knew the drill, made sure you didn’t get into too much trouble, and often made you feel like a total piece of shit. Every morning Jared had to call his chaperone and tell him what he was working on that day. The only thing that made it different from preschool was that you got to carry a gun.
Unsurprisingly, Jared’s training officer saw no urgency to a single pill, and it was a week before he even consented to accompany his younger colleague on the “knock-and-talk”—to knock on the door of the person who was supposed to receive the pill and, hopefully, talk with them.
That day, as Jared’s government-issued Crown Victoria zigzagged through the North Side of Chicago, the small Rubik’s Cube that hung from his key chain swung back and forth in the opposite direction. His car radio was dialed into sports: the Cubs and White Sox had been eliminated from contention, but the Bears were preparing for an in-division contest against the Lions. Amid the crackle of the radio, he turned onto West Newport Avenue, a long row of two-story limestone buildings split into a dyad of top- and bottom-floor apartments. Jared knew this working-class neighborhood well. He’d followed the baseball games at nearby Wrigley Field when he was a kid. But now this was Hipsterville, full of fancy coffee shops, chic restaurants, and, as Jared was now learning, people who had drugs mailed to their houses from the Netherlands.
He was fully aware how ridiculous he might look in the eyes of his grizzled training officer. They were in one of the city’s safest precincts to question someone about a single pill of ecstasy. But Jar
ed didn’t care what his supervisor thought; he had a hunch that this was bigger than one little pill. He just didn’t know how big—yet.
He found the address and pulled over, his chaperone close behind. They wandered up the steps and Jared tapped on the glass door of apartment number 1. This was the easy part, knocking. Getting someone to talk would be a whole different challenge. The recipient of the envelope could easily deny that the package was his. Then it was game over.
After twenty seconds the door lock clicked open and a young, skinny man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt peered outside. Jared flashed his badge, introduced himself as an HSI agent, and asked if David, the man whose name was typed on the white envelope, was home.
“He’s at work right now,” the young man replied, opening the door further. “But I’m his roommate.”
“Can we come inside?” Jared asked. “We’d just like to ask you a few questions.” The roommate obliged, stepping to the side as they walked toward the kitchen. As Jared took a seat he pulled out a pen and notepad and asked, “Does your roommate get a lot of packages in the mail?”
“Yeah, from time to time.”
“Well,” Jared said as he glanced at his training officer, who sat silently in the corner with his arms crossed, “we found this package that was addressed to him and it had some drugs inside.”
“Yeah, I know about that,” the roommate replied nonchalantly. Jared was taken aback by how casually the young man admitted to receiving drugs in the mail, but he continued with the questions, asking where they got these drugs from.
“From a Web site.”
“What’s the Web site?”
“The Silk Road,” the roommate said.
Jared stared back, confused. The Silk Road? He had never heard of it before. In fact, Jared had never heard of any Web site where you could buy drugs online, and he wondered if he was just being a clueless newbie, or if this was how you bought drugs in Hipsterville these days.
“What’s the Silk Road?” Jared asked, trying not to sound too oblivious but sounding completely oblivious.
And with the velocity of those descending airliners at O’Hare, the skinny roommate began a fast-paced explanation of the Silk Road Web site. “You can buy any drug imaginable on the site,” he said, some of which he had tried with his roommate—including marijuana, meth, and the little pink ecstasy pills that had been arriving, week after week, on KLM flight 611. As Jared scribbled in his notepad, the roommate continued to talk at a swift clip. You paid for the drugs with this online digital currency called Bitcoin, and you shopped using an anonymous Web browser called Tor. Anyone could go onto the Silk Road Web site, select from the hundreds of different kinds of drugs they offered and pay for them, and a few days later the United States Postal Service would drop them into your mailbox. Then you sniffed, inhaled, swallowed, drank, or injected whatever came your way. “It’s like Amazon.com,” the roommate said, “but for drugs.”