American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  But that didn’t matter, because just as Ross was going into hiding, another special someone was slowly but assuredly coming back into his life. The person he had sworn he would never talk to again: Julia.

  This was not part of his checklist.

  Prior to deciding to lie low for a while, he had been reading a book on productivity, which offered a message that wasn’t too dissimilar to the approach he’d taken in his college days, when he’d trimmed the unnecessary banalities in his life by not showering for a month or eating only a bag of rice for a week. One of the messages in the book was that the reader should “reboot” their online calendar by starting anew. When he had done just that, the computer had canceled an old event with Julia and automatically sent her a message letting her know.

  “How have you been?” she wrote back to him. “Still think you are amazing.”

  This led the onetime lovebirds to start e-mailing each other sporadically. While it was just flirting right now, maybe it would become something again in the future. If nothing else, it was a nice distraction from the chaos of his now many other worlds.

  As Josh, Ross went to the house on Fifteenth Avenue and took a brief tour. He was introduced to the people who rented the other bedrooms in the house and, after handing the cash to Andrew Ford, the man who was renting the room, Ross moved right in.

  Josh’s new roommates were unaware that the twenty-nine-year-old Texan who was now unpacking his few belongings, arriving with literally a laptop and a small bag of clothes—enough for a week’s travel—was really called Ross Ulbricht. And they certainly didn’t have any suspicion that he was also the Dread Pirate Roberts, who had tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoins on his laptop and in thumb drives in his pocket. To the roommates, Josh appeared to be a quiet and polite day trader, not the man who over the past few months had ordered the murders of half a dozen people on the Silk Road.

  Yes, there had been more people put to death at the hands of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  Shortly after the drowning and subsequent killing of Curtis Green, someone else had tried to scam DPR out of $500,000 in Bitcoins. Though, unlike in the previous case, where the money was just stolen and needed to be dealt with accordingly, this extortioner had threatened to release hundreds of real names and addresses of Silk Road users that had somehow been stolen. The only way to avoid this, DPR was told by the extortioner, was to pay $500,000.

  But Ross wasn’t going to fall for this again, so he had recruited a new group of henchmen, the Hells Angels, whom he had met through the site, to find the thief and have him killed. “This kind of behavior is unforgivable to me,” DPR explained to the Hells Angels over chat. “Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct.”

  The cost for this hit had been quoted as $150,000 for a “clean” murder. Dread wasn’t happy about this price, as he told the Angels; he had paid half that for a previous murder.

  Still, negotiating with a group of ruthless thugs wasn’t exactly an easy task, and $150,000 was nothing to Dread at this point, so he agreed to the fee. Over the coming days a picture of the dead man and an e-mail arrived in DPR’s in-box. “Your problem has been taken care of. . . . Rest easy though, because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.”

  Unfortunately, this didn’t end the problems for Ross. Shortly before the Hells Angels had murdered their prey, the extortioner had admitted to spilling his secrets to four other associates, one of whom went by the moniker “tony76” on the Silk Road. Without skipping a beat, DPR paid $500,000 to have them killed too.

  In Ross’s diary on his computer, he wrote about what he had done. “Sent payment to angels for hit on tony76 and his 3 associates,” which was followed by an update about some complicated work he had done on the servers of the site that day: “Very high load (300/16) took site offline and refactored main and category pages to be more efficient.”

  It seemed that murder, like code, was becoming easier to execute with practice.

  To top off all of this chaos, DPR had been issued a death threat from someone called DeathFromAbove, who claimed to know that he had been involved in the murder of Curtis Green. Ross also had another scare when a screwup with the coding on the site leaked the server’s IP address. If someone from the FBI or elsewhere had been watching, they would have been able to figure out where the server that ran the Silk Road was—something Ross had kept hidden for more than two years.

  And so the mix of the murders, the death threats, the Hells Angels, and the heat that came with them made it imperative for Ross to go into hiding.

  Variety Jones had done the same thing too, moving to Thailand to try to avoid being caught if things went up in flames. VJ explained that he had corrupt cops on his payroll there, so he would know if anyone was coming after him and would easily be able to scurry away before the Feebs knocked on his door.

  While all this turmoil was raining down on Dread, there had been a good development. VJ was no longer the only person with crooked cops on his payroll. DPR had managed to hire a couple too.

  He had put out some feelers to his network on the site, offered up some incentives here, some more there, and it appeared he might have an informant in the government who would keep him apprised of the hunt for the Dread Pirate Roberts, for a fee. The cost, the informant said, was going to be a measly $50,000 for each droplet of intelligence. It was still unclear how this would all play out and whether the details would help him evade the Feds. But it couldn’t hurt to try.

  Thankfully for DPR, the site was bustling with business. By the end of July, the Silk Road was on track to register its one millionth user. All in the span of a little over two years. Ross could never have imagined that the first small bag of magic mushrooms he had sold on the Silk Road would grow into a site where he was helping a million people buy and sell illegal drugs and other restricted goods. Even with all this stress now being catapulted in his direction, this salient fact was amazing to him.

  So paying an informant $50,000 here or the Hells Angels half a mil for a couple of murders there was just the cost of doing business. It barely put a dent in the site’s profits.

  Thankfully for Ross, he had become an adept and confident CEO of the Silk Road. There was no question now that he was in charge, and while others supported him, DPR was the final arbiter of every decision and no longer sought the approval of his onetime mentor, Variety Jones.

  As the boss, Ross often reminded some of his employees that “we are out to transform human civilization.” And he offered long and inspiring lectures to them, learning how to motivate the troops when tensions tightened. Which was exactly what some of his workers needed right now, with all the pressure on the site from hackers and law enforcement.

  “Let me tell you a little parable,” Dread wrote to one employee. “It’s the middle ages in Europe. . . .” He went on with the story: A man walks onto a construction site and he sees a group of laborers carving stone blocks for a building. Most of the men are working slowly, with long, unhappy faces. “What are you doing?” the man asks the laborers, to which they reply, “What does it look like we’re doing? We’re carving stone blocks.” But then the man sees another worker who has a glint in his eye and a smile across his face. This worker seems to be toiling at twice the speed of the others, and his stone carvings are impeccable. So the man goes over and asks him, “What are you doing?” To which this laborer looks back and answers: “I’m building a cathedral to the glory of God.”

  “If someone asked you what you’re doing,” DPR continued to his employee, “would you say ‘dealing with people’s problems’ or ‘working to free humanity’?”

  This was why Ross had to go into hiding: because there was too much to lose. He wouldn’t be working from René’s spare bedroom anymore. He wouldn’t be traipsing off to Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street to hole up in his favorite coffee shop and work on the Silk Road. With so many government agencies sear
ching for DPR and “DeathFromAbove” looking to kill him, it was imperative that he become more careful.

  So as the bedroom door on Fifteenth Avenue near the Outer Sunset closed, the men outside in the living room assumed that their new roommate, “Josh,” was getting to work trading stocks or doing some freelance IT support.

  But inside that room, Ross, Josh, and DPR knew that they were all working together to build their “cathedral to the glory of God” and, in doing so, working to free humanity from the tyranny of the U.S. government.

  Chapter 49

  CARL SWITCHES TEAMS

  The smell of coffee lingered in the air as Carl sat in his cubicle at the DEA offices in Baltimore, working away on his laptop. Out of the silence his cell phone rang, again. He knew exactly who it was before he even picked up the phone, which displayed a Spanish Fork, Utah, area code. It was Curtis Green again, the Gooch! This must have been the eighth time today that Green had called, and it was getting really fucking annoying.

  “I can’t believe you think I stole DPR’s money,” Green said on the phone in a high-pitched murmur. “I swear I didn’t steal anything from him.”

  Carl disagreed. “You’re a liar.” After listening to Green whine some more, Carl told him to chill out and continue to lie low, as DPR still believed he was dead, and, twisting some fear into him, he warned that if the leader of the Silk Road found out Green was really still alive, you could be sure that wouldn’t last long.

  “How long am I supposed to stay hidden for?” Green pleaded. “I haven’t been outside in months.” He then whimpered that he had nothing to do with the stolen money. Carl, fed up with this nonsense, hung up.

  After the fake-but-not-so-fake torturing in the Marriott Hotel, DPR had asked Nob to have his “thugs” kill Green. Carl couldn’t be bothered to fly out to Spanish Fork, Utah, again, so he told Green to fake his own death. The instructions were simple: Dunk your head in water, as if you’ve been drowned. Then pop open a can of Campbell’s soup. A tomato flavor. And then pour that soup out of your mouth, like you died from being held underwater and there was a mucuslike eruption from your mouth. Finally, so we have something to show, have your wife snap a picture of your lifeless body with your cell phone.

  Nob had then sent the grainy photo to the Dread Pirate Roberts as evidence that the thieving piece of shit Green had been murdered. “Died of asphyxiation / heart rupture,” Carl wrote to Dread.

  That was supposed to be the end of it. Yet shortly after that interaction, Carl had noticed a change in Dread. It was as if the act of taking another man’s life, or at least believing he had done so, had given DPR a taste of power and control that he had never felt before. The leader of the Silk Road had started to become more demanding and more confident than ever. When Carl—in a friendly “I’m on your side” capacity—tried to warn DPR about the potential consequences of running the site, Dread responded in a recalcitrant tone that Carl had never seen before.

  “I was not forced into this. I chose it,” Dread stated defiantly. “I chose it with full awareness of what the consequences would be.” He then offered his intransigent view that the Silk Road would grow so large that “it will force governments to legalize” drugs. Don’t question the Dread Pirate Roberts, because he was willing to do anything imaginable to see that through.

  Dread had become more stern about smaller issues too. When Nob was late to a chat meeting they had scheduled to talk business, he was berated by DPR and given a long lecture about the importance of loyalty and “honoring your word.”

  O captain, my captain.

  It didn’t take long for DPR to go from feeling disheartened by the death of Curtis Green to believing that the murder was Green’s own fault. “I am pissed that he turned on me,” he wrote to Nob. “I’m pissed I had to kill him. I just wish more people had some integrity.”

  Carl agreed wholeheartedly. “Integrity is probably the hardest thing to find [in people],” he wrote, pointing out that loyalty, fear, greed, and power are traits that most of us possess, “but integrity is rare.”

  It seemed that “integrity” was a rare trait in Carl also.

  Over the past couple of months, just like his co–case agent who had stolen $350,000 from the site, Carl had been trying to come up with a way to get money out of the Silk Road for his own personal gain too. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, Carl reasoned. No one would ever find out; these were Bitcoins; they couldn’t be traced; it was just like digital cash.

  And so he came up with a plan. Several plans, actually.

  One afternoon in the summer of 2012, he wrote to the Dread Pirate Roberts with a proposition. It turned out, just by chance, that Nob knew a corrupt government official. Well, whaddaya know? A guy who just so happened to be involved with the Silk Road case. Interesting. This official’s name, Nob explained, was Kevin, and he was willing to give information about the case to the Dread Pirate Roberts, but for a small donation.

  Dread wanted to know how Nob knew this bad cop.

  “He came to me,” Nob explained. “Told me about an investigation on me.”

  “Why did he do that?” DPR asked.

  “He did it for money :),” Nob said. “Kevin is a very smart and devious man.”

  In the same way that Carl had borrowed what he knew about drug smuggling in South America when he created the fictitious character “Nob,” he was now borrowing from his own demons to create “Kevin,” an unscrupulous government agent who got a thrill from breaking the rules and was now about to cross one of the most sacrosanct lines in law enforcement. He was going to start selling secrets back to the man he was hunting.

  Up until this point Carl’s supervisors had been able to see everything he wrote to DPR, as their chats were all put into evidence in DEA “Report of Investigation” documents. Aware of this, Carl suggested that Nob and Dread move some of their conversations, specifically those with information from Kevin, to PGP, a highly secure and private chat system that encrypts every single message. If Carl was going to commit a major felony, which he was about to do, he wanted to ensure that the government would never be able to find out by reading these messages.

  And with that, a new relationship blossomed.

  Under the guise of Kevin, Carl was able to help DPR stay one step ahead of federal authorities by sharing secret and highly sensitive knowledge about the investigation thus far. In return this bad cop required a “donation” of around $50,000 each time he handed over something worthwhile. A donation that DPR was more than happy to pay. It was a foolproof plan: The messages were encrypted, so no one except Carl and DPR could ever read them, and the payment was in Bitcoins, so no one could ever trace them. Carl would offer information about the investigation to the Dread Pirate Roberts, surreptitiously sharing the names of people who might be suspects in the case or of drug dealers on the site who had been arrested and might have turned—pertinent information that would help DPR stay ahead of the Feds. In exchange the man Carl was supposed to be pursuing would pay him $50,000 here, $100,000 there. Money that for Carl would eventually add up to $757,000.

  For the Dread Pirate Roberts, it was money well spent to ensure that if anyone in law enforcement ever figured out who he really was, Ross could run before they knocked on his door.

  Chapter 50

  A PARKING TICKET ON THE INTERNET

  For months Gary Alford read everything about the Silk Road that he could get his hands on. Every single thing, at least three times. He had become obsessed with the idea that he could find the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  Then, on the last Friday in May 2013, as he lay in bed with his laptop, Gary’s obsession gave the first hint of paying off.

  It had been the end of a typically long week working with the New York task force searching for DPR. Gary came home that evening and enjoyed a meal with his wife, and then the couple trudged upstairs to bed. Mrs. Alford fell asleep almost instantly, a
nd their dog, Paulie, was curled up on the edge of the bed gently snoring.

  A lot of the decorations in the Alfords’ bedroom were red. The comforter, the pillowcases, and even the walls all looked like they had been spray-painted a deep crimson. In this red room, Gary clicked away on his laptop, still reading about the Silk Road.

  Over the past few months Gary had put together a few assumptions about who DPR might be. Dread also knew the American political system incredibly well, which meant he probably lived in the United States. And he must have an impressive computer science background to have built such a Web site.

  Then there was the biggest clue of them all.

  Gary had read early posts (three times each) by the Silk Road creator, in which he said that buying drugs from the streets, where other people could rip you off or beat you up, was dangerous, and buying from the Silk Road would be much safer. Gary, who was black and had grown up in the housing projects, immediately took offense to this. “What does he mean by ‘other people’?” he said to his wife when discussing the case. “Clearly,” he had reflected, “he hadn’t grown up with these ‘other people’ because if he had—as I have—he wouldn’t be calling us ‘other people.’” But while he was irked by the statement, it gave him that final and most important clue: that DPR was white and likely from the suburbs.

  Even with these leads Gary had narrowed his search down to about, oh, maybe twenty million people. Still, it was a clue.

  Like all the other agents in law enforcement working on the case, Gary had already corralled a list of names that he thought could possibly be the Dread Pirate Roberts. These names included a programmer who had very libertarian-leaning views, someone who worked with Bitcoin, and yet another was a man who managed an online Web forum. But the chance of DPR being any of these people was slim.