by Nick Bilton
“I’m working on something,” Jared told Mike. “Just keep collecting them, bagging them as evidence, and I’ll keep getting them from you.”
After the Gawker article had published, the number of seizures had risen exponentially. In turn, Jared collected more envelopes, and his office at HSI had started to resemble a mail facility itself. There were now more than a hundred envelopes sitting neatly in three mail buckets on the floor behind his desk, a selection of which he was now presenting to the assistant U.S. attorney.
“It can’t be that easy,” the attorney said, dubious of the words coming out of Jared’s mouth and the images on his laptop. Even if it was “that easy,” these were such small amounts of drugs, the attorney wasn’t sure that this was the biggest drug-related issue his office should be dealing with.
“This isn’t about the drugs,” Jared said ardently. “This isn’t about that one little pill.” He had been practicing this speech for weeks, and he took a deep breath and continued. “This is about the site overall and what it stands for. It’s about how the people on this site are using our Internet—built by the United States government—to run an anonymous Web browser—also built by the United States government—and the United States postal system—to circumvent the laws of our country. And there is nothing we can do to stop them.”
The office was silent as the words sank in.
“This is just the beginning,” Jared continued. “It’s drugs now, but this could be used for terrorism next; imagine a worst-case scenario, where a group like al Qaeda uses the site, or the exact same setup, to coordinate attacks against America—all with tools built by the United States.” His point was simple. The Silk Road wasn’t just a digital drug cartel. It was a highly lucrative start-up with a lot of optionality. Amazon had begun as a virtual bookstore before becoming our everything supermarket. And Google, which had started as a search engine, was trying to build cars that could drive themselves. The issue, Jared reiterated, was not what the Silk Road was, but what it could be. The site was clearly run by some sort of genius who seemed to understand technology and politics as much as he understood his audience. And whoever that prodigy was, he or she had to be stopped before this site became a movement and ultimately unstoppable.
As Jared spoke, the totality of what he was saying hit the attorney with utmost fear. Jared was there warning that, in the same way the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center did so using American-owned jets, the people behind the Silk Road could destroy the very fabric of the United States using tools built by America. The implications were terrifying.
The attorney interrupted Jared midsentence. “Yes,” he said as he looked at the envelopes on his table and then up at Jared. “Yes, we’ll assign someone to your case.”
Chapter 16
FROM AUSTIN TO AUSTRALIA
I’m selling my truck,” Ross told all his friends on Facebook. “Make me an offer!”
Fall had blanketed over Austin, with 2011 nearing its end, and Ross had only two weeks to get his life packed into boxes and sell everything else before he left town.
Fudging Erica. If she hadn’t posted that tormenting message on Facebook about Ross being a drug lord or kingpin or whatever, he wouldn’t be in such a rush to leave the country. Weeks before the chaos erupted he had been thinking of going to see his sister, Cally, in Australia for a while, to get some space from Julia and his Texan friends and family, but now the trip was a must, and it was on fast-forward.
Ross was pretty sure he had deleted Erica’s terrifying post in time, but if he had not, and someone had actually seen it, he would find himself in more trouble than he was capable of dealing with. He also had no way of knowing if Erica’s Facebook outburst was the last he would hear from her. If she truly wanted to be vindictive, she could easily go one step further and tell the FBI or DEA, or even those senators who had painted a bull’s-eye on the Silk Road months earlier.
One thing was certain: Ross didn’t want to take any chances. He scrambled, getting his life in order to make a quick and easy break from Austin to Australia.
The truck sold quickly. His personal belongings were handed down or given away. He stuffed other things in boxes and hid them under his bed at his parents’ house, next to the box of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures he had painted as a child. He packed the few belongings he needed day to day, including his gray V-neck T-shirt, his single pair of jeans, and, most important of all, his laptop.
Paranoia had started consuming his thoughts, leaving Ross on edge about those around him. Was the DEA or the FBI hunting for him? Was he a cop? Was she? What did everyone know? But the most stressful thoughts centered around those whom he had told about the Silk Road.
It wasn’t that Ross had been stupid or naive in telling them about the site. Rather, back then, when he first shared his secret, Ross could never have predicted that the Silk Road would grow as big as it had. In his mind on opening day, he had imagined a few dozen people shopping in his online marketplace. That had quickly turned into thousands. Now, with the media, the senators, and who knew how many people in law enforcement looking for him, he needed to backtrack.
A few days before he left for Australia, his bags packed, his passport and laptop ready to go, Ross went over to his friend Richard Bates’s house and knocked on his door. Richard had all but stopped helping Ross with the programming problems on the Silk Road, fearing the site was growing too big and terrified by the attention it was receiving in the press. But he was still the only person besides Julia who knew the true identity of the site’s creator. Ross had to fix that before anyone else found out.
It was early evening on November 11, 2011, and for weeks nerdy Richard had been planning a party to celebrate the mathematical anomaly of 11/11/11, when the day, the month, and the year all lined up to create a string of elevens. Ross showed up before the festivities began, knocking on Richard’s door with a somewhat panicked rattle.
“I need to talk to you about something,” Ross declared. They both wandered inside Richard’s stark white, almost medically clean apartment, marred only by a few decorations for that night’s festivities. “Have you told anybody about—you know—about my involvement in the Silk Road?”
Richard spoke in his usual timid whisper, explaining nervously that he had almost told someone but then hadn’t, so in short, no. No one else knew.
Ross expanded on his question, telling Richard that someone had posted a message on Facebook about Ross running a drug Web site that the authorities would surely like to know about.
Hearing this, Richard felt that familiar wave of fear shroud him. Surely he was an accomplice to Ross, having helped him build the site and knowing who ran it. Frail Richard could go to jail for the rest of his life, as could Ross. And if there was one thing Richard was definitely not built for, it was life behind bars. “You’ve got to shut the site down,” Richard pleaded. “This is not worth going to prison over.”
Ross had anticipated this response. “I can’t shut the site down,” he replied.
“Why?”
“Because,” Ross solemnly said to his friend, “I gave the site to someone else.”
PART II
Chapter 17
CARL FORCE’S TOMORROW
Most people go through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great. Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth to do. But then tomorrow comes—and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there aren’t that many tomorrows left.
Carl Force knew this feeling well. He never thought he’d end up this way, sitting in a mauve-colored cubicle in a nondescript skyscraper in downtown Baltimore, staring at his computer until the moment he could collect his things and leave.
Another day, another tomorrow.
Carl was what’s known in law enforcement as a “solar agent,” a guy who works only when it’
s light outside. (He often referred to himself this way, half joking and half proud of the title.) When the clock struck three, Carl would slip out of the office and drive back across Baltimore to his wife and kids in his government-issued Chevy Impala.
To anyone who walked by his cubicle, Carl looked like the kind of person he was trying to scrub off the streets: a drug dealer. He almost always wore a black beanie over his bald head. His sunken dark eyes and a peppery beard of stubble hid the wrinkles in his stout face. And then there were the tattoos covering his body, including the black Celtic tribal pattern that swerved across his back and down his arms.
Like most of the old-timers at the Drug Enforcement Administration, Carl was in his midforties and jaded. Sure, he was a narcotics cop, but his job was as mundane as any other corporate office worker’s. He spent most of his days staring at his desktop computer, sipping stale coffee from one of the promotional mugs he had picked up at DEA conventions over the years. Sometimes he listened to Hope 89.1, a local Christian radio station that would whisper the Lord’s Prayer into his ear, promising that if Carl followed the ways of the Bible and did the right thing, he would be granted the life he had always wanted.
Life hadn’t always been this way. Thirteen years earlier, in late 1999, when he joined the administration, he ate, slept, and shit the DEA. In those early days he absolutely loved the thrill of a bust. Waking at 4:00 a.m., slipping on his bulletproof vest, checking the chamber of his gun, and kicking in a door or two, yelling at some big-time dealers or low-level meth heads to “freeze!” and “get the fuck on the floor!”
It was as exciting a job as anyone could wish for. But over time the early mornings started to strain. The door kicks were less exciting. When one dealer went to jail, another filled his seat on the street.
The metamorphosis from rash young newbie to jaded old-timer had happened slowly. At first Carl couldn’t find good cases on his own. Then he had trouble making busts. There was also the high pressure of undercover work, where you have to catch someone or they’ll catch you. His downward trajectory was compounded by the fact that he’d secretly developed his own substance abuse problem. Finally, all the strain had been too much, and Carl was eventually arrested for a DUI while he was an agent, which led to a mental breakdown four years later. He almost lost it all—the family, the job, the cat. But the Lord had stepped in, and Carl had been offered amnesty with this desk job as a solar agent. Since then there hadn’t been many opportunities arriving at his cubicle.
But on a late-January day in 2012, that was about to change.
He was sitting at his desk waiting for another day to pass when his supervisor, Nick, yelled for Carl to come into his office. These moments came often: a shriek from Nick and some sort of order to take on cases that most agents thought were ridiculous. This included the regular request to go and do “jump-outs,” the name given to the act of driving around Baltimore, pulling up to a street corner, jumping out of the car, and grabbing low-level dealers. Most agents thought this was a pathetic way of trying to beat the drug problem, as opposed to going after the big bosses, where they believed they could actually have an impact.
Still, when Nick called, you went. Nick’s office was dark, as usual. While Carl’s supervisor was lucky enough to have a window with a paltry view of frozen and barren Baltimore, he always kept the blinds drawn, blocking out even the tiniest pinprick of light. Adding to the darkness, Nick had pinned posters of Iron Maiden and Metallica all over his office walls.
“So,” Nick said to Carl, “I just got a call about the Silk Road Web site.”
Carl perked up. He had heard about this strange Web site a month earlier at a law enforcement meeting when an investigator with the U.S. Postal Service had given a brief presentation on it. There was a new phenomenon, the postal inspector had said, that was starting to infect mail ports all across the United States, and lots of people were sending small amounts of drugs through the system. The inspector had explained that the connection point for these dealers and buyers was called “the Silk Road.”
Later, intrigued by what the postal inspector had said, Carl searched online and read a few articles, including Adrian Chen’s piece on Gawker. He then thought about the implications, which were momentous. You couldn’t do jump-outs online, he reasoned. But given that Carl had no knowledge of computer forensics, it wasn’t a case he would have even thought of being assigned to. That was, until Nick called Carl into his office and asked if he wanted to assist a group of HSI agents in Baltimore. “They’ve picked up an informant who says he can lead them to the owner of the site,” Nick told Carl.
When Carl asked why he was being asked to join the case, Nick explained: The HSI group in Baltimore was not a drug team and usually tracked counterfeit stuff or, as Nick put it, “fake Louis Vuitton bags and shit like that.” So if the Baltimore group wanted to go after drugs, they needed a DEA agent on the team. “You want in?” Nick asked.
Carl thought about it for a moment. He was at the point in his career where he could have easily said, “No, not interested,” walked out of Nick’s dark office, and continued living life as a solar agent, coaching his son’s football games, going to church with his wife and kids on weekends, and hopefully realizing one day that his tomorrow was his family. Or he could get involved in this investigation and maybe—just maybe—make a name for himself at the DEA.
“Sure,” Carl said to Nick. He would take on the case.
Carl walked out of his supervisor’s office unaware that with the single word—“sure”—he was about to enter an underground world so dark and full of avarice that it would drag him in headfirst, and that as a result of the temptations of the Silk Road, Carl Force was going to lose everything that mattered to him.
Chapter 18
VARIETY JONES AND THE SERPENT
Ross had been in Australia for only a few weeks when he woke up from a strange dream. In his sleep he found himself face-to-face with a giant hundred-foot-long centipede with dark eyes and massive, twiddling legs. Hovering in the background was a looming snake, larger and more sinister than the centipede, slithering around in the darkness.
When he awoke the next morning, Ross didn’t know what the dream meant or why he wasn’t afraid of these sinister creatures. To him they didn’t seem evil at all. Or maybe they were, and he simply wasn’t able to see their true nature. But as he set about his day, he couldn’t get those slithering creatures out of his mind, eventually sharing a story on Facebook about the dream, curious what it might mean.
Maybe it was just the daunting reality of the past few months breaking through his subconscious. Back in Texas, the twin pressures of maintaining the Silk Road and keeping his involvement a secret had worn him thin. At particularly fraught moments he even wondered if he should forfeit his business, just give it up. But ever since he had moved to Sydney to be closer to his sister, life had gotten so much better. His mounting anxiety in Texas was giving way to a laconic calmness Down Under. Now Ross spent his days surfing at the golden beaches, drinking beer with his new pals at tiki bars, successfully flirting with girls, and, in between these social gatherings, working on the Silk Road.
But even the pleasures of Bondi Beach, where he was staying, couldn’t entirely eradicate the fears that came with running a start-up that trafficked in the multinational drug trade. In particular Ross still could not entirely shake the fact that, other than Erica, whose words he could always deny as hearsay, two real people—Julia and his old friend Richard—definitively knew that he had created the Silk Road.
Sure, he had cobbled together a story for Richard, explaining that he had given the site away to someone else. But the Julia problem remained. And no matter what fabrication he could possibly come up with, both would always know he had fathered the site. Ross, though a genius at many things, was clueless when it came to untangling this particular mess.
Luckily, someone was about to become a staple in his l
ife who knew exactly how to fix these issues, and many other formidable challenges that impeded the Silk Road’s progress.
Ross interacted with dozens of different people on the Silk Road each day, including vendors, customers, and a couple of new libertarian part-time employees who helped with the site’s various programming problems. They all went by pseudonyms to hide who they really were, names like SameSameButDifferent, NomadBloodbath, and SumYunGai. (Ross’s own nickname was simply Silk Road or Admin.) But one of the people Ross had recently started talking to on the site, a man who operated under the nom de plume Variety Jones, seemed almost immediately to be different from everyone else.
He sold weed seeds, but he wasn’t just any weed seed dealer. Variety Jones was a sommelier, someone capable of telling you a seed’s variety—its viticulture—along with the strain, just by looking at a picture of it. And unlike the hordes of impatient and pushy drug dealers on the Silk Road, Variety Jones, or “VJ” as he was known in the forums, was guileful and intelligent. He (assuming he really was a “he”) knew everything about everyone, on the site and off—even the creator of the site.
Just two days after the menacing serpent-and-centipede dream, Ross and VJ started chatting on TorChat, a messaging platform that promised privacy for those using it. “I want to talk to you about security stuff,” Variety Jones wrote in one of their earliest correspondences. “Lots of security stuff.”
Ross was eager to hear, now fully aware that he was no longer just being targeted by the U.S. government but was very likely being hunted by authorities in dozens of countries. Given that real money was now flowing into the site too, with Ross pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week in revenue for the sale of drugs and guns, there would surely be more authorities hunting him soon. The only way to hide from the cops was to build better security into the site. Ross was a gifted coder, sure, with a quixotic vision of the future, but he knew better than anyone that he was out of his depth when it came to fixing the site’s vulnerabilities.