American Kingpin

  He started with the Gawker article, then clicked on dozens of other newer links, scouring the words and images, until he leaned back in his chair, staring at his computer as pages of articles about the drug-dealing site and Bitcoin and Tor flickered on the screen. He knew full well, as his supervisor had told him, that teams of law enforcement had been searching for the creator of the Silk Road for almost two years, and each road they had traveled down had gone nowhere. He also knew that he would have to find a new investigation technique if he wanted to have any chance of taking down the site and its creator.

  But how? he thought.

  His mind spun in a thousand different directions as he tried to figure out how he could approach the case anew. Almost immediately an idea struck him. He thought back to a time in his life that he didn’t remember but that he had heard so many stories about: the summer of 1977, the year Gary Alford was born. He remembered the story of David Berkowitz, the American serial killer who had murdered six people and wounded seven others in New York City that year, the man better known as the Son of Sam. And Gary imagined that the way the cops had caught that ruthless serial killer would be the way Gary Alford could catch the leader of the Silk Road.

  Chapter 46

  LIFE AND DEATH ON THE ROAD

  Green is dead and disposed of,” Nob wrote. “I will get you a picture for proof of death.”

  “Ok, thank you,” the Dread Pirate Roberts replied. “I guess they were unable to get him to send the coins he stole.”

  “They had to do CPR on him one time, actually the trick to torture sometimes is keeping the guy alive,” Nob wrote back, explaining that Curtis Green, the thief who stole the Dread Pirate Roberts’s $350,000 in Bitcoins, had been tortured and drowned before he ultimately succumbed to a heart attack. “Died of asphyxiation / heart rupture.”

  When Dread didn’t respond to the macabre description of the murder, Nob asked, “You ok?”

  “A little disturbed,” DPR said. “But I’m ok.” And then he admitted to Nob, “I’m new to this kind of thing is all.”

  Variety Jones had reassured Dread that what they had done wasn’t simply the right decision but the only one. “We’re playing for keeps,” VJ wrote. “I’m perfectly comfortable with the decision, and I’ll sleep like a lamb tonight, and every night hereafter.”

  “Well put,” DPR wrote back. “Enjoy the rest of your evening mate.”

  “I will, you too,” VJ replied. “Sweet dreams.”

  When Ross opened his next e-mail from Nob, he was greeted by an image of a lifeless Curtis Green peering back at him. Green’s thick jowl hung off to the side, and a pool of vomit had erupted from the dead man’s mouth. From the picture it appeared that Curtis’s T-shirt was drenched, likely from the waterboarding Nob’s thugs had administered before the thieving Green had taken his last breath.

  Ross then saved the picture to an encrypted folder on his computer and messaged Nob again, asking where he wanted the final $40,000 to be sent for the hit. “Send to the same account?”

  “Yes.”

  Ross was obviously torn up by what he had done. Killing someone wasn’t an easy decision, but he also knew that this was something he might have to do again in order to inoculate his empire against people who threatened it. There was no fate worse to him than losing control of what he had built.

  It was, after all, his legacy, the thing people would remember him for two hundred years from now. He wanted so badly to leave an imprint on this world and for people to know (eventually) that he was the one who had done it.

  Being forced to order the murder of someone was just the price he had to pay to leave that mark. And who the fuck was anyone to judge? All of the greatest people in history had to make such decisions. The president of the United States faced these kinds of choices every day, pressing a button that unleashed a drone over a village in Afghanistan, killing people to protect the republic. This was the case in business too. Dozens of Chinese workers who made iPhones had subsequently jumped to their deaths because their working conditions were so dire, but Steve Jobs had to accept those sacrifices because, by fucking God, he was changing the world on a massive, massive scale. This was simply the plight of men and women who wanted to leave a dent in the universe.

  In addition to the murder, other issues had been pummeling Ross. As of late hackers had again been targeting the Silk Road on a regular basis, knocking the site off-line for hours at a time. While DPR’s employees were working tirelessly to build defenses, the only way to get the hackers to stop was to pay them a ransom of $50,000 per week thereafter.

  What Ross needed right now was a break. Thankfully, the same weekend that DPR paid Nob for his services and it was clear Green was dead, Ross was going to see his new girlfriend, Kristal.

  Things had really blossomed between them since the camping trip a few weeks earlier. After a night in the woods looking up at the stars and sitting around a campfire, they returned to the city and made plans to see each other as much as they could. Over e-mail and text message, they told stories about their pasts, and shared hopes about their futures—though Ross only skimmed the surface of those dreams.

  He had felt so lonely over the past year running the Silk Road. He had all of this success, and no one to share it with. So he fell in love headfirst with Kristal. A weekend together soon turned into every weekend together. Once, Ross flew up to Portland, where Kristal lived, and they spent an entire day cuddling under the covers in her apartment. On another trip they set off for an adventure at a nearby campground, where they holed up in a cabin in the woods for the weekend, Ross wearing nothing more than a blue robe and his glove shoes and Kristal in a green dressing gown. Ross felt alive! He sketched pictures of her. After the trip she sent him messages of herself blowing a kiss. He sent her notes of adoration back. But he never told her about his Web site. Never could; never would.

  In between all of this, he continued to steer the ship of the Silk Road, sneaking off to transform into the superhero who was going to legalize drugs and make the world a safer place. The man who navigated tribulations only people with his level of power had to negotiate. And it was that power, at this moment, that he needed more than anything to protect.

  Someone was now dead who had deep ties to the Silk Road and its founder, and it was not a stretch to think that the cops would soon find the body of Curtis Green. It wouldn’t be long before they figured out what had happened. The murder, the site, and the cocaine bust would all point law enforcement toward the Dread Pirate Roberts. He needed dedicated minions now who could really defend and grow the Silk Road into the biggest enterprise on the planet.

  As Ross explained to one of his employees: “I’m in it to win it.” Then he reiterated what was at stake here. “Before I die, I want the world to be so radically different that I will be able to tell my story in person without repercussion.”

  Ross was fully aware that he needed more soldiers in his ranks to reach that goal. “I’m thinking we may even staff up,” he had told VJ as they discussed moving the operation to the next level. They had killed someone, and they were now running a site that trafficked hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs and anything else illegal. Any one of these felonies could land them in jail for life.

  It wasn’t that Ross was worried; he truly believed that the Dread Pirate Roberts simply couldn’t be stopped—you can’t stop an idea! But Ross also knew that the best way to stay ahead of the cops who might knock on his door was to stay ahead of what they knew.

  As he returned from his weekend in a cabin with Kristal, he was determined to bring in more bodies to help protect the world he now governed. But he didn’t just want to bring on hackers and drug dealers. He needed to up his game. He needed an arsenal of hit men and muscle if someone else was arrested or tried to squeal to the Feebs. But most important, Ross needed to find someone inside the government who would be able to keep him apprised of what the Fed
s knew. Maybe a local cop, an agent with the FBI or the DEA, or even someone at the Department of Justice. He was willing to pay this person whatever he or she wanted. There was simply too much at stake not to. He wasn’t going to let any more fuck-ups happen. It was time to go to war.

  Chapter 47

  GARY’S BIG CHANGE

  Everything felt completely out of place for Gary as he reported for duty on the DEA strike force he had been assigned to in New York City. Unlike the IRS’s beige downtown office building, which was surrounded by a blockade of federal monoliths and local courthouses, his new workplace was above Fourteenth Street, nestled in among hipster bodegas, cupcake shops, and the Chelsea-Elliot housing projects.

  At the IRS, every cubicle was as tall as a man, which afforded privacy for agents and their spreadsheets. Yet the cubicles in his new office were low and open. As a result, when Gary sat down at his desk, no matter which direction he looked, he found himself gazing directly into someone else’s eyes. (This was all intentional, Gary was told, designed to get people from different government agencies—NYPD, DEA, IRS, and local and state police—on the task force talking to one another about their cases.) He had no privacy. People in his new office dressed differently too, wearing “casual” street clothes, like sneakers and T-shirts. Gary didn’t own any of these, so he had to go shopping with his wife to buy boots and jeans, which made him feel like he was wearing someone else’s clothes. Buttoned-up Gary felt completely out of place.

  The most dissimilar aspect of the new task force was the open-door policy. People shared the information they had gleaned from their investigations with everyone else. It was all for one, not a cadre of solo IRS suits counting pennies alone.

  Before arriving, Gary had done his homework, scouring news articles, forum posts by the Dread Pirate Roberts, and research about the Dark Web, all to get acquainted with the case he was about to join. While reading these pieces, Gary had come across the first white paper that had been published about Bitcoin, written by the creator of the digital currency, an anonymous man who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

  Gary read the paper once and nothing stood out. He read it a second time, and still nothing. But the third time he noticed something, in a section of the paper that referenced the “Gambler’s Ruin problem,” a theory that no matter how much money you have in a betting scenario, the casino (or house) has an infinite amount of money, and therefore, if you keep making bets, the house will eventually win. Gary reasoned that the same theory was true for DPR and the Silk Road. The U.S. government was the casino; DPR was the gambler. Eventually, Gary believed, because the Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t stop playing, he would lose.

  To say Gary was excited about this case was the understatement of his career. He was ecstatic! As soon as he was settled into his office (or as close to settled as he could be), he was briefed by his new teammates. This was when he very quickly learned that everyone else was not as enthusiastic about the Silk Road case as Gary was—at least, not anymore.

  Investigators were burned out and fed up, given that their probe had gone nowhere. To them Gary arriving with all of this enthusiasm for the case was like a child waking up in mid-August thinking that it was Christmas morning.

  His co–case agents immediately noticed something about Gary too. When he spoke, he would often interrupt himself and utter a rhetorical “You know?” or “Riiiiight!” almost like someone saying the words “rye” and “tight” together very quickly. He did this all the time. Gary could be chatting away at full stride, and in midsentence he would reach into the depths of his core and, as if he were trying to impersonate a bear, bellow the word “Riiight!” followed by “You know? You know?” and then he would just keep going as if nothing had happened.

  Still, “You know?” and “Riiiight” aside, the task force agents explained where the investigation stood. It was May 2013, exactly two years since the famed Gawker article had been published, and there were dozens of government agents and task forces all over the world trying to figure out how to breach the Silk Road. There was a team in Baltimore (Carl), a lone agent in Chicago (Jared), and more than a dozen others scattered around the globe, all trying to figure out the identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts—but the case so far had proved unsolvable.

  Midway through his briefing Gary was informed that since nothing else had worked, the task force wanted to try a new strategy. They instructed Gary to follow the money rather than the drugs. One of the places they wanted him to start with was a user on the Silk Road who had been buying and selling Bitcoins for drug dealers and the site’s creators, acting as a digital money launderette. The strike force told Gary to try to figure out who this human Bitcoin-to-cash ATM was. Then they could try to trace some of those Bitcoins.

  Gary was completely up for the task of finding the money launderer, but he also had an idea how they might be able to find the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  “How?” one of the cops dubiously asked.

  “The Son of Sam,” Gary replied.

  Gary had heard stories about that New York City serial killer known as the Son of Sam so many times as a kid that it was impossible to forget. But what had always stuck out to him, he explained to the agent, was the way authorities caught the murderer.

  It had all taken place between 1976 and 1977 in the same neighborhood where Gary was raised. At the time, the Son of Sam had gone on a killing spree in New York, terrorizing the city and making fools of the NYPD. No matter how many police officers and detectives City Hall threw at the investigation, it was unsolvable. A task force that was set up to find the murderer went nowhere. Yet shortly after the blackout of 1977, one police officer decided to try a new and creative angle to find the killer. Rather than search the crime scene looking for weapons or clues, the officer decided to look for cars in the areas of the murders that had received parking tickets around the same times as the crimes. The cop reasoned that even the most brazen murderer wouldn’t have stopped midway through to go and feed a parking meter. So maybe the Son of Sam had gotten one or two parking tickets during his attacks.

  After a painstaking search through tens of thousands of violations, the cops found a pattern. There was a 1970 yellow Ford Galaxie sedan that belonged to a man who lived in Yonkers and had been ticketed numerous times within blocks of each of the murders. When detectives went to the car owner’s home, they were greeted by David Berkowitz, a defiant twenty-four-year-old, who admitted instantly that he was the Son of Sam. “Well, you’ve got me,” Berkowitz said at the time, and then, with one last barb toward police: “What took you so long?”

  Gary told his new team that the similarities abounded. In 1977 traditional policing techniques had failed to solve the murders in the same way that in 2013 modern-day procedures for capturing drug dealers had failed to catch DPR. Both men taunted the police. Both men grew more brazen as they continued to get away with their crimes. And the task forces then and now had failed to find them both.

  “I’m going to crack this case,” Gary told anyone who would listen. “I really think I’m going to get DPR.”

  Just like the parking citations had helped catch the Son of Sam during the summer of 1977, Gary was convinced that somewhere out there the founder of the Silk Road had made a mistake. He believed that in a dark corner of the Internet there was the digital equivalent of a parking ticket that would help unmask the Dread Pirate Roberts. And Gary Alford was determined that he was going to find it.

  Chapter 48

  ROSS GOES UNDERGROUND

  It was time to go into hiding.

  But this time, rather than the Dread Pirate Roberts having to disappear, it was Ross Ulbricht’s turn.

  A lot of other terrible things had happened since the murder of Green. Someone was looking for DPR as retribution. The heat was onto him too, with FBI, DEA, HSI, and a slew of other agencies scurrying around the Silk Road site—a sign that there was no fucking around right no
w. Time to begin an emergency landing.

  It was early June 2013, and Ross had no choice but to go through the list he had put together months earlier. The “in case of an emergency” checklist. “Find place to live on craigslist for cash,” he had written to himself back then. “Create new identity (name, backstory).”

  As he scrolled through rental listings on Craigslist, he came across the perfect place: his own room in a three-bedroom house on Fifteenth Avenue near San Francisco’s Outer Sunset, where he could pay cash to cover the $1,200 monthly rent. He anonymously e-mailed the lessor and, following step two on his checklist—“Create new identity (name, backstory)”—rather than calling himself Ross Ulbricht, he used a completely fictitious name, Joshua Terrey. Another name that he reasoned could never be traced back to him.

  But creating a new identity was going to be difficult. After all, there were already two people: Ross and DPR. If he had to remember details about a third person, lies would get complicated very quickly. To ensure that Ross didn’t forget much about Joshua, he stuck to stories he knew when he e-mailed his new potential landlord. He explained that he, Josh (for short), was twenty-nine years old, was from Texas, and had recently returned from a trip to Sydney, Australia. “I am a currency trader and do some freelance IT work as well,” Ross, as Josh, wrote to the couple who were renting out the apartment. “I mostly keep to myself, spending most of my time working.”

  Ross wouldn’t have to worry about any of his real-world friends, like René or Selena, finding out about his new alter ego Josh, as he had a plan to keep everyone separate, never having his old friends over to his new place or his new roommates out to meet his old friends. As for Kristal coming down to visit from Portland, well, that had imploded almost as quickly as it had ignited. As soon as things started to deepen, Ross lost interest. How could you sustain a relationship with someone when you were only giving them half of yourself? As he had confided in his pals, both in the real world and on the Silk Road, he wanted a family one day. Just not yet and just not with Kristal.