American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  But the meeting with the DEA agent had given Tarbell and his crew an idea. The site was no longer just hawking drugs. People were now peddling several hundred different types of hacking tools too, including key loggers, banking Trojans, malware apps, spyware, and a slew of other digital goods that landed right in the purview of the men sitting in the Pit.

  There, in that moment, the FBI team decided that was how they would get involved with the Silk Road case. Rather than help the DEA find drug dealers, the cybercrime agents would go after the site themselves. Tarbell picked up the phone, presenting the strategy to his bosses.

  Several weeks later approval finally came back down the chain of command, saying that the team could open an investigation on the site. After months of red tape and wasteful officialdom, Tarbell and his coagents opened a new case file, numbered 288-3-696.

  In addition to HSI in Chicago, a task force in Baltimore, and another group of local and federal officials in New York City, there was now a new agency hunting for the Dread Pirate Roberts: the Cyber Division of the FBI, and the Eliot Ness of cyberspace would be leading the charge.

  Chapter 44

  CAMPING AND THE BALL

  February 2013

  I can’t remember if I told you,” DPR wrote to Inigo. “But I’ll be gone until Sunday afternoon.”

  Ross was relieved to be getting away. The past few weeks had been a complete disaster. He had even wondered if there was something wrong with him. In his online world nothing was going right. His employees were screwing up all over the place (including Variety Jones, who had failed to deliver some new security code on time). And his off-line world wasn’t much better, given that he was single and lonely and couldn’t seek advice from anyone he actually trusted.

  On top of his melancholic state of mind, he had discovered that in addition to Curtis Green stealing $350,000 a couple of weeks earlier, someone else had purloined another $800,000 in a different heist.

  Eight. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. Just gone. That was more than $1.15 million stolen in a matter of days. Luckily for Ross, a million dollars was now just a small fraction of his savings, but it still stung. There had been a reprisal, of course. And DPR had finally put a hit out on Green. The cost wasn’t too insane, either: $40,000 up front and another $40,000 after he was dead.

  The decision hadn’t been easy. That was for sure. But he was convinced that it was the right one; illustrating to the world that society could be safer by legalizing drugs was more important than the life of a man who might squeal to the Feds. Plus, Green had broken the rules of DPR’s world. There had to be consequences. Without them there would be chaos.

  Before leaving town, DPR sent Inigo one last message, instructing him to “hold down the fort for me.” Then Ross closed his laptop, leaving DPR hidden within the encryption software he had installed on his computer. There would be no need for him where Ross was going for the next few days. He grabbed his bag and left his apartment.

  San Francisco’s temperature had clung to the high forties most of the day, yet Ross was dressed as if he were going to the beach, not up north for a two-day hike in the wilderness. His fellow campers had planned appropriately. Selena, whose birthday they were celebrating, was bundled up with woolly socks and a thick scarf. René was wrapped three layers thick, like a piece of precious porcelain about to be shipped in the mail. And Kristal, Selena’s sister who was in town from Portland, looked like she was going camping in Antarctica. Ross, on the other hand, had decided this trip would require only a pair of thin Adidas shorts and his new, bizarre, bright red Vibram FiveFinger shoes, which made it look like he was wearing a pair of gloves on his feet.

  But in a matter of minutes the cold ceased to matter to Ross; he felt warm inside as he looked over at Kristal, who was, quite frankly, too beautiful to have him worried about his outfit.

  Ross instantly had a crush.

  He was smitten with Kristal. Her long, straight black hair was perfectly braided in the back, revealing her splendid hazel eyes and perfectly puckered pink lips. She looked just like Pocahontas.

  Once the bags were packed in the car, he hopped inside and it pulled away as the four friends chatted in unison. They drove along the 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge came into view. Selena pulled out her camera to snap a picture of the orange towers, which seemed endlessly high. Ross could see the bright blue sky, as vast and open as the ocean he had seen in Dominica. To the right he could see Alcatraz again, that looming prison in the distance.

  They continued along the curvy roadways through Sausalito and into Mill Valley as they made the hour-long drive to the entrance of the hiking trail.

  The beginning of the trail was a well-worn gravel path that soon turned into a sinuous bridle walkway. Before long the group found themselves in the thick of nature. Ross and René were perfect gentlemen, offering to carry the ladies’ backpacks. Each man slipped one on his back, one on his front. They high-fived with delight.

  • • •

  On the other side of the world, in Perth, Australia, sixteen-year-old Preston Bridges and his mates had been planning their own festivities for a while now. Preston had already picked out his outfit for the Year 12 Ball and had been in constant discussion with the other kids at Churchlands Senior High School about the after parties they would attend.

  Preston was a handsome kid, with thick, fluffy eyebrows and flopped-over blond hair that hung to one side of his face. He had chosen to spend the hours before the festivities on the beach with his mates, jostling in the fleecy, warm water and talking about the evening ahead.

  “You look like you went for a spray tan,” his father, Rodney, joked with him at around 4:00 p.m. when he got home. Preston smirked and bounded off down the hall to change into his tuxedo for the dance.

  A little more than an hour later, at around 5:30 p.m., Preston walked out of his bedroom for what would be the last time in his life.

  He looked smart in that black tuxedo, his matching bow tie strung perfectly around his neck. When his mother, Vicky, arrived to pick him up, she noted how handsome her boy looked. His dad snapped a few pictures of them together. In one, Preston turned to his mother, pulled her close to him, and kissed her squarely on the cheek as she beamed. He soon set off for the ball.

  • • •

  Ross and his trio of friends finally found camp and set up their blue-and-white tents on the flat grass of the hillside that overlooked an endless green ocean of Northern California Douglas fir trees. It smelled like pines, and a feeling of calm came over them all—especially Ross. René commented that it was like paradise as the group sat down on the slope and watched the world do nothing. Ross snacked on oranges, pistachios, and rice cakes. Soon they built a bonfire. As night fell, Ross and Kristal talked and gazed up at the stars, the smell of smoke disappearing toward heaven.

  The rest of the weekend for Ross was like a dream. He swam in Kent Lake at the head of Peter’s Dam—even though the water was freezing. He rolled down a bright green hill and giggled like a child. He played cards; they hiked, joked, threw Frisbees, and skipped, literally, as they explored the wilderness.

  But most important, Ross and Kristal fell for each other like two teenagers at a high school dance.

  • • •

  The Sunmoon Resort hotel in Perth, Australia, was the perfect place for an after party for the dozen young teenagers who had just left the Year 12 Ball. The hotel had inexpensive rooms with balconies that overlooked the esplanade and the green, jagged ocean along Scarborough Beach. The smell of chlorine wafted gently up from the pool below as Preston and his friends made their way to the top floor of the resort and into the suite they had rented together.

  As the night drew on, friends and acquaintances came and went. Yet at around 4:30 a.m., as the boys contemplated calling it a night, one young teenager showed up at the hotel with a surprise. He wasn’t one of Preston’s close friends, but he wanted to
be, and he had brought a gift.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s N-bomb,” the kid explained to Preston. “It’s like LSD.” They make it in China, he said. It was synthetic, a drug made in an unregulated lab, and while it was sixty times stronger than acid, it was perfectly safe. The boy said he had purchased a “party pack”—buy ten, get one free. He had gotten it from a Web site he had learned about called the Silk Road. The drugs had simply arrived in the mail.

  Of the eight boys who were in the hotel room that night, five decided to take a hit of N-bomb. The boy who had brought the drugs offered Preston two blotters. Of those five boys who took the drug, only one had an almost immediate adverse reaction to it: Preston Bridges.

  He immediately began acting erratically. The world around him started to become surreal. He panicked. What the fuck was going on? The hallucinations were taking over and there was nothing he could do about it. Make it stop! He didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. His friends tried to calm him, but to no avail. Everyone was in a panic, most of all Preston.

  The room seemed to spin on its axis. Help! Help! Around and around. Preston started to run. He was still in the hotel room. Still on the second floor. But he ran anyway. He ran off the balcony and into the air, falling thirty feet, headfirst, into the parking lot below.

  Sirens began wailing in the distance.

  The heart monitor made a slow, repetitive beeping noise as Preston lay on the gurney in the hospital. His thick, fluffy eyebrows and flopped-over blond hair sat motionless as tubes snaked around him. His tuxedo was gone; now he was shirtless, with sensors glued to his chest to monitor his vitals. His black bow tie had been replaced by a neck brace. And that classic Preston Bridges smile was no longer there; instead a plastic hose had been placed in his throat to ensure that he could breathe.

  His mother, Vicky, collapsed on the floor when she saw him. His father wept into Preston’s sister’s arms. As the day drew on, hundreds of kids from school arrived, streaming in groups of eight into the hospital room as they wept for their friend who lay there in front of them, the soccer-playing, beachgoing teen now motionless.

  On Monday afternoon the doctor ushered Preston’s family into a small room in the hospital. Then, as tears and shock covered the faces of his mother, father, and sister, the doctor informed the family that at 3:48 p.m. sixteen-year-old Preston Bridges had died.

  • • •

  And then, just like that, the weekend was over. Ross, René, Selena, and Kristal packed their bags and drove back through the orange towers of the bridge. Back to San Francisco. Back toward the Silk Road.

  Ross returned home with a broad smile. He felt renewed as he opened his laptop and logged on to his world.

  “So everything smooth while I’m gone?” he asked Inigo.

  “Yep. nothing exciting happened.”

  “Goooooood,” the Dread Pirate Roberts replied.

  “Surprising huh?” Inigo responded. “Like something always happens when your away. It’s like the curse is lifted.”

  Life was looking up. Ross was making plans with Kristal to visit her in Portland in the coming weeks. They were going to stay in a cabin in the woods. They would get massages and order food in a cozy cabin, then romantically nuzzle up to each other over a long weekend.

  He was so jubilant about the prospect of his new love interest that he had even broken one of his own security rules, telling several of his employees and confidants on the site about the girl he had just met. He even told Nob, his drug-smuggler-turned-hit-man who was currently searching for Curtis Green.

  “You seem to be in a very good mood!” Nob wrote.

  “I am,” DPR replied. “It’s a girl :) A woman I should say. An angel.”

  A weekend that had started out shitty had turned great. And the big, fat, sloppy cherry on top was that the Silk Road had made its usual fortune that week, selling drugs to people all over the world, including a “party pack” of N-bomb to a sixteen-year-old in Perth, Australia.

  PART IV

  Chapter 45

  GARY ALFORD, IRS

  The sidewalks of Manhattan reminded New Yorkers that summer wasn’t in sight just yet. Half-frozen, dirty dollops of sludge lined the city streets as wind whipped garbage down the avenues like frigid tumbleweeds. On a mid-February morning in 2013, in front of 290 Broadway, just off Duane Street, a line of men and women waited pensively to pass through a security checkpoint into a massive beige tower. While the mere sight of the building was intimidating enough, the name that hung on the gold placard on its east wall could—regardless of the temperature outside—send shivers down anyone’s spine: INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE.

  This was one of those rare government buildings in which someone who uses a calculator for a living can wield more power than a person who carries a gun.

  One of those calculator-carrying men was Gary Alford, who arrived for work at that beige tower like clockwork each day. A large and forbidding man with wide shoulders and a square jaw, when Gary stood still, he was completely motionless, like an anvil that had fallen to the floor and couldn’t be moved. He was African American, and his dark complexion often seemed even darker against the white of his shirt, which he always wore to work, along with a crisp suit and tie.

  While Gary looked like a normal IRS employee in his business attire, he was far from ordinary and had a number of eccentricities that made him stand out from all his coworkers.

  One of the strangest of these idiosyncrasies was the bizarre fact that he read everything—literally everything—three times. It didn’t matter what it was; if it had text on its pages, Gary would read it once, then again, and then once more. When he received an e-mail, he would read it three times before replying. He would read news articles three times. Books; text messages; research papers; someone’s tax forms. He did this, he told people, to ensure that he remembered more information than those around him. When he was younger, he had heard that the brain retains only a small percentage of words when you read, so he reasoned that if he started consuming every snippet of text at least three times, he would remember more.

  Sure, it was repetitive, but most of the things Gary did were.

  Each of his mornings was a replica of the one before. Gary would commute exactly the same route to work, arriving at the IRS offices at exactly the same time and walking the same worn path through the same marble lobby.

  There was no reception desk or waiting area on Gary’s floor, just two locked doors—one to the north and one to the south. On the wall of the hallway there was a poster of Al Capone, the American gangster who controlled the flow of liquor during Prohibition. The mug shot on the poster was there to remind employees that when it came to the Criminal Investigation division of the IRS, where Gary worked, it was good old math that took down Al Capone in the 1930s, not liquor bottles or smoking guns. And it was the IRS that landed the gangster in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, off the coast of San Francisco.

  Like most of his coworkers, Gary had a strong New York accent. He’d grown up in the city, gone to college there, and now lived there with his wife and their fluffy Maltese-Yorkie mix, Paulie. But unlike other agents he worked with, who had grown up in high-rise apartments or the suburbs of Long Island, Gary had been raised in one of the city’s grittiest low-income housing projects.

  He was born in the Marlboro Houses in Gravesend during the summer of 1977. The week of Gary’s birth, a brutal heat wave caused a lightning storm, which struck a power station and plunged New York City into complete darkness. Within a matter of hours after Gary entered the world, chaos ensued, with looting, riots, and arson sweeping across New York’s boroughs. (Gary used to joke with people that “I shut the city down when I was born!”) On top of the riots and power outages, New York was also being haunted that summer by a serial killer nicknamed the Son of Sam.

  Gary didn’t last long in the housing projects. In the 1
980s his family moved farther east, to Canarsie, after colorful crack vials from New York’s rising crack epidemic had started to line the gutters around Stillwell Avenue, where they lived.

  Now, thirty years later, Gary sat amid the faded green and white cubicles at 290 Broadway, checking his e-mail (reading each one three times) and finishing up reports from previous investigations that involved people who had tried to hide money from the U.S. government in far-off countries.

  But while Gary’s morning had begun like any other, it was about to change drastically. His phone rang with a call from the IRS supervisor, asking the young and ambitious agent to come into his office.

  As Gary wandered into the room, taking a seat in an uncomfortable lime green IRS chair, his director immediately pounced. “There’s a task force we want you to join,” the supervisor said. (There would be no small talk here; this was the IRS, after all.) The supervisor continued, moving into an explanation of who, what, and why. The case, he told Gary, involved a Web site where you could buy drugs and guns. “What do you know about the Silk Road Web site?” (Gary knew nothing about the site and stared back with wide eyes.) “What about Tor?” (Nope. Nothing.) “And Bitcoin?” (Blankness.) “Well, that doesn’t matter,” the supervisor said. “The strike force is a drug task force, and you’re going to be leading the money-laundering side of the case.” (A tinge of excitement.) “It’s a big change, Gary.” (You’re damn right it is.)

  The strike force, Gary was told, included local and state police investigators, DEA agents, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. That alone made the case seem important to Gary. Finally Gary was told that he would be moving to a new office in Chelsea, a few dozen blocks north.

  It was time to bring in the people with the calculators.

  He left the supervisor’s office grateful for, and invigorated by, his new assignment. Back in his cubicle he immediately logged on to his computer and began reading as much as he could about the Silk Road, three times over.