American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  Though Ross and VJ knew that wasn’t going to happen just yet.

  As Ross sprung out of the water in Costa Rica, he rinsed the sand off his body and scarfed down breakfast before scurrying away to work on his laptop in private, hidden from prying eyes. “I’m in a magical place right now to be sure,” he told Variety Jones when he logged into their chat window. “I’m stoned on oxygen and the sea breeze.”

  But that now-familiar specter of something bad was looming again, and VJ had something else to talk about.

  “Dude, I’m worried about our winner,” Variety Jones said, referring to the person who had won the 4/20 contest and was about to be awarded the all-expenses-paid vacation and a few thousand dollars in cash.

  “Whasamatta?” DPR replied.

  “He’s trying to dry out; Heroin; it’s not working, and I think his recent influx of cash didn’t help.”

  “Oh geez. Fuck, what are we doing,” DPR said, then joked: “Shoulda thought more carefully about dropping $4k on an addict; maybe our next prize will be 3 months in rehab.”

  “Yeah,” VJ said. “It does show we’ve got problems Gillette doesn’t have in their promos.” Variety Jones then joked that their next promotion should be “Win 3 months in Rehab! The more drugs you buy, the more chances you have to win!”

  As Ross changed the subject of the conversation to more pressing issues, specifically how to expand the Silk Road and grow the business so he could reach that special ten-digit number, the calm Costa Rica sky was starting to turn a deeper gray. A violent storm was on the horizon, ominously moving closer to land.

  Chapter 29

  VARIETY JONES GOES TO SCOTLAND

  It was dark and quiet in Glasgow, Scotland, as the clock in the hotel room wound past 2:00 a.m. and a middle-aged man, sitting at his computer, sipped some water to quench his thirst.

  The man known as Variety Jones was balding and disheveled, his T-shirt stained and stretched at the neck, his eyes worn and droopy like a plastic figurine left too near a fire. This was a man who had been through hell and back, his body ravaged by years of disease, drugs, and jail, but he had clearly enjoyed the trip.

  On his computer screen a number of windows sat splayed open. One had some sort of programming code and another appeared to be a chat window with two people talking.

  The man with the droopy eyes clicked on the chat box and then began typing.

  “Tappity tap tap,” he wrote to DPR, then pressed the “return” key.

  A moment later there was a reply: “Taparoo.”

  “I’m in the land of 12 Euro tins of beer in a mini fridge,” Jones wrote. “Oh joy!”

  “Hello hotel bill.”

  VJ had been lying low in London with his girlfriend for the past few months while he worked on the Silk Road for his unofficial boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts. Mostly their relationship had gone swimmingly. Their skill sets were complementary, and they largely shared the same worldview. But a fissure had begun to surface. After Jones had come to Glasgow to celebrate his uncle’s death—yes, celebrate: as VJ told DPR, the “Jones” clan “threw bigger funerals than weddings,” with the casket in the middle of a pub and a revelry of dancing and drinking, made up of four hundred friends and family, flowing around the deceased uncle—he had logged on to check in with DPR and resolve a moral disagreement they were having.

  It wasn’t often that they argued. The relationship between Jones and Dread was impenetrable, and a true and tight friendship had developed between the two men since a year earlier, when they first met through the Silk Road. Their alliance had blossomed over their shared belief that drugs should be legal, and guns too. VJ was a loyal servant and companion. He had even talked about buying a helicopter company to break DPR out of jail if he was ever caught. “Remember that one day when you’re in the exercise yard, I’ll be the dude in the helicopter coming in low and fast, I promise,” he had written to Dread. “With the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come get you.”

  But even with that bond, fundamental disagreements over the direction of the site would crop up, and Variety Jones was trying desperately to steer DPR in a new direction on a particular topic.

  It wasn’t even up for debate in VJ’s mind that the Dread Pirate Roberts was as libertarian as they came and that he believed the Silk Road should be a place to buy and sell anything. There were no rules and no regulations, and as a result there was something illegal for sale on the site for literally every letter of the alphabet. Acid, benzos, coke, DMT, ecstasy, fizzies, GHB . . . but it was the letter H that had Variety Jones in a very difficult quandary. He was fine with everything before and after that letter, but heroin—he hated it.

  “I don’t even have a problem with coke,” VJ wrote to DPR, but “H, man—in prison I’ve seen guys—I wish that shit would go away.”

  Variety Jones was open about the time he had spent in jail. He told long and funny stories about people he had met behind bars and explained the ins and outs of getting around the system, including how cans of “mackerel” were the currency of choice in the British prison he had been confined to years earlier. “I treat [prison] like being in a 3rd world country with poor communications infrastructure,” he joked.

  But he told Dread about his time in jail not for amusement but as a prelude to sharing a story about what he had seen heroin do to people in prison: In lockup they drug-tested you randomly, but they performed these exams only during the week, on Monday through Friday. Everyone inside knew how long each drug lasts in your system. If a prisoner smoked some weed, for example, it would show up in his piss for up to a month. As a result, no one ever smoked weed behind bars. But heroin only sticks around in your bloodstream for two days, tops. Which meant that if you injected H on a Friday, it was out of your system by Monday morning, just in time for the drug tests to begin.

  “On Fridays,” VJ wrote, “folks would go wild on H.” And in the maximum-security wing where he was housed, H days had been nicknamed Hell Days, because that’s exactly what they were like. “Guys would jam a week’s worth of H in 4 hours.” The wails from the inmates who were under were followed by moans as they came to and then a week of vomiting and tweaking as they spun out, unable to sleep, jerking and tugging and twisting in their beds as they waited for the following Friday to arrive, when they could ease the pain from the Friday before, and the cycle would begin anew.

  “It wasn’t pretty in there then,” VJ said. “They just wanted to sleep.”

  Now, long out of jail and the deputy of the biggest drug site the world had ever seen, VJ found himself in a moral predicament.

  DPR had been talking to the South American smuggler, Nob, about transporting massive amounts of heroin through the United Kingdom and selling it in bulk on the Masters of the Silk Road site. But before they could even begin building such a site or taking money from Nob, DPR wanted to ensure this Nob character was legit. So he had asked VJ, his consigliere, to help facilitate an early test deal.

  Morally, though, Jones told Dread, “I don’t think I could make money off importing H. If you want to, I’ll offer all the help and advice you need, but I don’t want to profit off of it.”

  Ross had never seen the effects of heroin in person, as he noted to VJ that the experience of Hell Days “sounds awful.” But it still didn’t deter him from his belief system. As Ross had argued back at Penn State, it wasn’t his place to say who could put what into their body. “I’ve got this separation between personal and business morality,” DPR explained to VJ. “I would be there for a friend to help him break a drug dependency, and encourage him to not start, but I would never physically bar him from it if he didn’t ask me to.”

  Variety Jones contemplated how hard he should press the issue. He had been doing his best to counsel the Dread Pirate Roberts, but sometimes DPR’s ego got in the way. On more than one occasion VJ had lost his patience. “You should be a
cting like Steve Jobs, not Larry the Cable Guy,” he had written to DPR about a previous debate. “Leaders lead, they don’t throw out things willy nilly, and wait to see who follows what.”

  Often Dread would try to defend his ideas, but there was no grappling with Variety Jones; a maestro on the keyboard, he was a master debater, a true contender who could have stood up to Ross on any topic—and often did.

  The conversation about H dragged on for a while, but there was no sign that DPR was ever going to relent. So, while sitting in that dark Glasgow hotel room, VJ ultimately decided to let DPR win the discussion about heroin.

  There were two reasons, though. The first harkened back to the last time he had let a disagreement like this cause a rift between him and a business partner, years earlier when VJ co-ran a Web forum that sold weed seeds online. That dispute had destroyed that enterprise and, according to Jones, had ended in a shoot-out in Texas.

  But more important, Variety Jones decided to let the issue go because he had much bigger plans for his involvement in the Silk Road. While the Dread Pirate Roberts didn’t know this yet, VJ didn’t want to just be an employee; he wanted to be co-captain of the ship.

  Chapter 30

  THE ARMORY OPENS

  Ross had anticipated a lot of different scenarios for the Silk Road, but not this. In his mind, years earlier, he had envisioned a free market where anyone could buy or sell anything without being traced by the government. There would be no bureaucrats telling people what they could sniff, swallow, or inject. It would be completely free and open. And that was exactly what the site had become.

  Yet to some of the buyers and sellers on there, this freedom was a problem. The mellow people who bought and sold weed on the site didn’t want to be associated with the speedy people who bought and sold cocaine. Some of the hard drug dealers didn’t want to be in the company of the right-wing crazies who hawked guns. And some of the gun guys didn’t want to be in the same shopping cart as the scummy heroin dealers. Round and round it went.

  Even though all these people were dealing in illicit activities, they each had a moral sense that their particular outlawed product was more just than another.

  Variety Jones was preternaturally aware of these hidden dynamics. He had been warning his boss about this for some time, pressing Dread to at least get the guns off the site so he didn’t lose the weed sellers. This would also help mainstream customers feel more comfortable shopping in the drug aisles. “So grandma can come here for her cheap Canadian pharma meds,” VJ wrote, “and not trip over a Glock 9mm” handgun on the way to the cash register.

  Ross saw things differently. The ability to accept anyone was in many ways Ross’s superpower. He had practiced this philosophy from high school to the Silk Road. So he found it perplexing that others couldn’t just go about their business and enjoy the free world he had created.

  Because of his unflinching acceptance, there were now more than two thousand different types of drugs for sale on the site, as well as lab supplies to make your own drugs and products to store and sell those drugs. There were digital goods, including key loggers, spy software, and other similar tools to hack into someone’s e-mail or webcam. People could buy forged documents, including passports, fake IDs, and even counterfeit cash that was indistinguishable from real money. And then there was the most contentious section of the site, labeled “weapons,” which had grown so much that you could buy everything from handguns to AR-15 automatic weapons. You could pick up bullets, grenades, and even a rocket launcher if need be.

  But if Ross wanted to keep growing his flourishing business, he needed to appease the more conventional customers, libertarian or not.

  “Guns will scare off a lot of mainstream clients,” Variety Jones had said.

  So Ross was going to have to make some changes. If he really wanted to make drugs legal, which was his ultimate quest, he was going to have to solve the gun issue. While he wouldn’t bar them—he wouldn’t bar anything—he instead decided to create a gun-only Web site.

  When he explored the idea with VJ, they had together come up with the name the Armory. (At first it was going to be called “Silk Armory,” sticking with the Silk Road branding, but they both decided it sounded too bizarre. Or, as VJ pointed out, “Silk Armory sounds like they sell Hello Kitty AK-47’s.”)

  Thankfully, it hadn’t been too difficult to build the Armory; it wasn’t like creating an entirely new site. Ross simply siphoned the code from the Silk Road, slapped on a new logo—a big, rugged A with wings—and changed some design elements.

  But the Armory failed to solve a number of existing problems with weapons sales. Ross had hoped that people would be able to use the site to buy guns with the same ease as picking up a .22 at a local Walmart. But it turned out that shipping guns in the mail was a lot more complicated than placing a few sheets of acid (which looked like blotter paper) in an envelope. Ross needed to ensure that the people buying and selling the weapons from the Armory would be able to get them to one another without someone from ATF showing up at their door and escorting them to jail.

  But he kept asking himself how.

  It wasn’t like he could call his local post office on Park Drive in Austin and say, “Hey, I want to send some guns to a friend. What’s the best way to do this?” So he did what most people his age do when they don’t know something: he went to social media. Plodding over to his personal Facebook and Google+ accounts, Ross posted an update asking, “Anyone know someone that works for UPS, FedEx or DHL?” When a friend asked why he wanted a contact at one of these mail companies, Ross replied, “Well, I have a startup idea in the shipping sector, but I have zero experience there.”

  There was another issue that came with the guns Web site. It meant that more law enforcement would be looking not just for the generals who ran the Silk Road but also the people behind the Armory. (Not to mention the bulk drug Masters of the Silk Road site, which would bring more global attention and the interest of more governments when it eventually opened for business.)

  The scrutiny the site was now receiving from the press, and the inevitable added attention that would slam upon it with the opening of the Armory, made it clear that the stakes were rising. All of these terrifying prospects led Variety Jones, who was now being dubbed the site’s security chief, to decide that it was time for him to move further underground.

  The best place he knew to do that was Thailand, where he had hidden once before and where, he told DPR, he had a few cops on the payroll. But going back to Thailand meant he would have to leave his lady behind in London.

  “I’m getting her out of the crossfire,” VJ wrote to DPR. “I need the world to think we’ve split. If I end up in Guantanamo, I don’t want her in the next cell.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “She knows I’m changing the world, and that it’s dangerous for her,” VJ replied. “But I’m not safe to be around.”

  With all of this added attention Ross knew that he was going to need to move again too. Going back overseas didn’t make sense right now, and staying in Texas, near his family, wasn’t an option either. The lies and the possibility of being found out were just too risky. What he needed was a place where he could be on his laptop for eighteen hours a day and no one would question why he was being antisocial or what he was working on.

  Which meant he had to go to San Francisco.

  As he opened the doors of the Armory Web site, he began plotting his move out west, reaching out to friends who lived there and figuring out where he would stay and what his cover would be once he arrived.

  But before Ross could go anywhere, he had one last loose end to tie up. He opened his Web browser, navigated to Julia’s Facebook page, and sent her a message asking if they could meet.

  Chapter 31

  ROSS SILENCES JULIA

  Ross strolled along Rainey Street in Austin, past rows of old homes that had been conver
ted into bars, as he headed toward the Windsor on the Lake apartment building. It was late afternoon in the summer of 2012, and the street was relatively quiet. A few people sat on outdoor benches amid the faint sounds of Texas as they guzzled beers and ate local barbecue. He approached an apartment building on the street, pulled out his phone, dialed a few numbers, and waited for an answer.

  He hadn’t been back in Austin for long, and wouldn’t be there much longer. But before he left the Lone Star State again, maybe for good, he had to resolve the biggest problem of all.

  “Hey,” he said into his phone. “I’m out front.”

  A minute later Julia appeared, running down the steps to greet Ross with elation. After a long hug hello, she stood back and looked him up and down to examine his outfit (blue jeans, black belt, gray V-neck T-shirt, and matching sneakers), then laughed. So much time had passed since their romance had begun; their lives had taken drastically different routes, and yet here was Ross Ulbricht, looking virtually unaltered. “You’re wearing the exact same outfit I bought you at Penn State!” she snickered. Ross simply smiled.

  They hadn’t seen each other since that fateful night in October, and Julia was thrilled to reconnect. She ushered him into her studio to show him around.

  Boudoir photos lay everywhere, some on walls, others tilted on her desk. Ross immediately recognized a large picture of a woman arching her back. It had been taken in the studio where he had experimented with growing his first batch of mushrooms in Julia’s underwear drawer two years earlier. How far he had come since then! Just twenty-four months ago he had been broke and aimless; now he was rich and as steadfast as ever.