American Kingpin

  The shower and basement tests were only the beginning of Ross’s peculiarities. At the foot of his bed there were two garbage bags, which he casually confessed were his “closet.” One bag was for clean clothes, the other for dirty. Every item of clothing he owned—every sock, every shirt, and those geriatric shoes—was a hand-me-down from a friend.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Julia said as she batted her eyelashes at him. “We’re going to fix this; I’m going to take you shopping for some new clothes that actually fit you.”

  “Sure,” Ross said as he went in to kiss her again.

  But there were still things she wanted to learn about Ross. More questions about this strange yet brilliant man. “What are those books?” she asked, pointing to the pile of titles that lay near his bed.

  At this query Ross paused and was attentive with his answer. He had explained to her on their first date that in addition to joining the NOMMO drumming club, he was also an avid member of a club at Penn State called the College Libertarians, a political group that met once a week to discuss libertarian philosophies and to read books on economics and theory. The books—penned by Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and other visionaries—were what he read for fun when he wasn’t devouring applied physics papers.

  When Julia asked what libertarianism was, Ross, without judgment, explained: everything—from what you do with your life, to what you put in your body—should be up to each individual, not the government.

  If it hadn’t been for how smart Ross was, Julia might have walked out of the basement that day and never looked back. If it hadn’t been for how handsome he was, she might never have answered the phone after their early dates. And if it hadn’t been for Ross’s assertiveness, which young Julia had never experienced in a man before and needed more than anything at this sad point in her life, she might not have agreed to become his girlfriend in the coming weeks.

  Instead she was deeply intrigued by this peculiar and possibly perfect man. He looked back at her, smiling as he leaned in to kiss her again. It was clear to her that Ross was smitten. She, in turn, tried not to let on how besotted she was becoming with him. But what wasn’t clear to either of them, as they rolled around on his dinky bed in the basement, was that the relationship they were about to embark on would be the most tumultuous romance of Ross’s and Julia’s adult lives.

  And, for Ross, it would be his last.

  Chapter 4

  THE DEBATE

  Students with backpacks and books rushed by one another as they shuffled into the Willard Building at Penn State. The lights inside the building flickered on as the fall sun set over campus. There, amid the normalcy of college life, Ross Ulbricht was pacing in one of the large lecture rooms, preparing for a school debate.

  The room where he stood was wide and deep, with rows of chairs that would soon be filled by the students shuffling inside—all people who were there to hear tonight’s discussion among the College Libertarians, the College Republicans, and the College Democrats on a number of U.S. election–related topics, including whether drugs should be legalized in the United States.

  It had been more than a year since Ross had failed to make it onto The Amazing Race, but none of that mattered now. Life at Penn State was pretty spectacular, mostly because of the school clubs he had joined.

  Drum group was bewitching (Ross had become so obsessed with drumming that he would play the instrument in his head while he lay in bed at night). And then there was the libertarian club, where Ross showed up for every single meeting and had, over the past year, immersed himself in every facet of libertarian political philosophy. He flew around the country to libertarian conferences to hear experts speak (the club paid his way). He also spent countless hours sitting in the Corner Room bar along College Avenue with Alex, the club’s president, and other members, discussing and honing his beliefs about the government’s role in society and how to reduce its unfair and often inhumane heavy-handedness.

  While enthralling and stimulating, this was all coming at a price. Ross’s obsession with the clubs was having a negative effect on his schoolwork.

  Though that wasn’t the only distraction in his life affecting his studies. There was also his now-girlfriend, Julia. The two lovebirds—it hadn’t taken long for the two to say “I love you”—spent almost every moment together. As this was going to be Julia’s first Christmas without her mother, he invited her to come to Austin for the holidays. Before they left, he snuck into his Penn State laboratory and created a crystal that he fashioned into a ring as a gift for her.

  Ross appreciated that Julia would sit for hours and listen to him talk about his beliefs, including one of the topics of tonight’s debate, which Ross knew better than anyone: the reformation of the American drug laws. “Take your seats, please,” the professor managing the discussion croaked to the audience. “We’re about to begin.” Ross, in rare form with his tucked-in shirt, sat down at a desk next to two other College Libertarians. There were some brief introductions from the professor, and then the room fell quiet.

  “It is not the government’s right to tell the people what they can and cannot put in their bodies,” Ross began, going on to explain that drugs—all drugs—should be legalized, as it would make society safer and people have a right to do what they want with their bodies.

  There were only about forty people in the audience at the debate, and most were in attendance only because it earned them extra credit from their poli-sci professor. But Ross took the discussion as earnestly as if he were about to step in front of the U.S. Congress.

  The College Republican responded to his arguments: “How can you legalize something that kills tens of thousands of people a year?” The College Democrat agreed.

  Ross calmly countered, “So do you think we should outlaw Big Macs from McDonald’s too, because people gain weight and have heart attacks and die as a result of them?”

  As was always the case with the drug debate, Ross’s opponents quickly grew flustered. They tried throwing arguments back at him, but there was nothing they could say that Ross didn’t have a retort for.

  “And should we outlaw cars because people get into car accidents and die?” Ross pressed his opposition. He offered arguments defending people who smoked pot, and even those who took heroin in the privacy of their own homes, noting that they were no different from someone who has a glass of wine after work to relax.

  As for the violence around drug sales, he argued that this savagery existed only because the government imposed such harsh and evil laws to try to deter the sale of drugs, and dealers had to employ nefarious means to protect themselves in the wars that erupted on the streets. “There are no gang wars over the sale of alcohol or Big Macs, because those are legal,” he continued. And on top of it all, he reasoned, if drugs were legalized, then they would eventually be sold in regulated form. Bad drugs, cut with rat poison or talcum powder, would disappear from the marketplace.

  “It’s someone’s body and it belongs to them,” Ross said as he looked out at the audience. “And the government has no right to tell them what they can and cannot do with it.”

  Ross knew in his heart that his arguments were sound and that he had thought through every aspect of the war on drugs. What wasn’t clear to him still, and what he kept asking himself in the hours between school, his extracurricular activities, and his girlfriend, was what he could do with those passionate beliefs to help change what he saw as the harmful and tyrannical drug laws in America.

  Chapter 5

  JARED’S KHAT

  No.”

  That was it. One word. A nonnegotiable syllable.

  “No,” Jared said again.

  His supervisor looked at him in disbelief, unsure if he had really just heard a rookie Customs and Border Protection officer refuse a direct order. (Yes, he had. He definitely had.) The peon—five-foot-nothing, twenty-six-year-old Jared Der-Yeghiayan—looked even
younger than normal as he sat across from his older, rotund director—like a kid sitting in a principal’s office, his legs swinging back and forth in the chair, his feet never coming close to the floor.

  Jared didn’t feel he had much to lose with the answer. Customs and Border Protection wasn’t exactly his dream job. He had ended up here only because he didn’t have a choice if he was going to pursue his dream of working in law enforcement. Either he continued to work in the movie theater down in Lincolnshire, or he could come to Chicago O’Hare and stamp people’s passports for a living.

  Jared had tried to get into the Secret Service, his dreamiest dream job. But the examiner, an American-as-they-come questions-and-answers man, had probed Jared about his father, a sitting U.S. judge of Armenian extraction who had fled Syria during the genocide years earlier. At first Jared had answered politely, but few things could rile him up as much as doubts about his family’s allegiance to America. Needless to say, after a heated debate, he didn’t get the job.

  Soon afterward, Jared had applied to the DEA, but he’d gotten into another overwrought debate with the polygraph tester over what constitutes a crime. He didn’t get that job either.

  The U.S. Marshals Service, Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation all said no to Jared because he didn’t have a degree. He had dropped out of college after two weeks, with no patience for being judged by professors, and even less tolerance for the time their classes demanded. Besides, what was the point of four years of school when most of the people he knew who had gone through college still couldn’t get a “real” job? He walked off campus one afternoon and never went back.

  At the behest of his father, Samuel, who had once run the agency overseeing Customs and Border Protection, Jared settled for the most monotonous government job, stamping passports day after day.

  His hope was that this gig would lead to something bigger and better. Which it had, but as he challenged his supervisor with that repeatedly uttered “no,” it was becoming obvious that, as per usual, Jared was starting to piss everyone off.

  This particular debacle had started a year earlier, in late 2007. After a few dull years on the passport line, Jared had been given the opportunity to try to find people smuggling drugs into the United States. Catching drug smugglers sounded like fun and sexy work, but not with the kind of drugs that Jared had been tasked with finding. His quest was to catch people who were sneaking a speedlike substance called khat into America. Unlike similar drugs, such as cocaine, which were processed in a lab or jungle somewhere, khat was a leafy green plant and therefore more difficult to identify than large bricks of white powder. Since it was so mild, more akin to drinking some intense coffee than snorting a line of blow, khat was also the least important drug for anyone in government to go after.

  But Jared assumed the task of finding khat with the same fanatical compulsion as someone assigned to capture the world’s most evil terrorists. He printed out hundreds of flight logs of people who had been caught with khat in the past, laid all the documents out on his living room floor as if he were Carrie Mathison on Homeland, and searched for similarities among known smugglers. He scrutinized every detail of each arrest until he found a pattern.

  The first clue: all of the smugglers had booked reservations the day before a flight. Second, the couriers used only Gmail or Yahoo! e-mail accounts. And third, they had (obviously fake) phone numbers that used a shared formula. With these hints, and others, he searched through the list of incoming passengers arriving at O’Hare who fit his profile. Eventually he identified an inbound passenger who he believed would be smuggling the drug.

  The following day customs officials pulled that man off an incoming flight, opened his suitcase, and discovered it was lined with khat. (Holy shit! It worked.) The same thing happened each subsequent time Jared ran his search on the incoming Chicago passenger database: they pulled khat out of the bag.

  Jared’s profiling worked so well that he started to search through the national databases, experimenting with his theory on other U.S. airports. And sure enough, it worked every time. Customs officials at JFK would be told about a target, at which point they would open the suitcases of the passenger Jared had identified and subsequently find bags of the drug hidden in socks, shirts, and other crevices of the luggage.

  But there were a couple of snags, not the least of which was that JFK agents believed that khat was a pointless drug to go after in the first place. There were no nightly news briefings about officials finding a pound of khat on a flight from the United Kingdom and no awards being handed out to customs officers for these arrests. To make matters worse, Jared’s success made other agents look ineffective by comparison. Not getting credit on a bust meant you couldn’t climb the bureaucratic ladder to increase your pay and vacation time. And after enough unofficial complaints had come in, Jared was called into his supervisor’s office.

  “You have to play by the rules if you want to be successful here,” Jared’s supervisor said. “You’re pissing off people all over the place and—”

  “No,” Jared interrupted.

  Again? Another no? What the fuck was wrong with this guy?

  “Look, I’m just doing my job,” Jared tried to reason. “I’m following the trends and—”

  “Yes, but you’re doing your job out of your jurisdiction,” the boss barked. “You’re assigned to Chicago, and that’s all you’re supposed to do: find shit in Chicago.”

  Jared didn’t do well when he was told what to do, and his temper was starting to flare. He had been given an assignment that he had pulled off in spades, but because of typical government bullshit, he was being told he was doing a less effective job. Shouldn’t he be getting praise and applause?

  “You see this?” Jared said, pointing to the gold and black Customs and Border Protection (CBP) badge clipped to his shirt. “The last time I looked, it said, ‘the United States of America’ on it, and I’m pretty sure that JFK airport is in the United States of America.”

  The supervisor looked back at Jared in shock. But the peon kept going.

  “I won’t talk to you about this in person anymore,” Jared said as he stood up and walked toward the door. “If you want to discuss this again, please put it in writing.” And in one brief moment the supervisor had just learned a lesson that everyone who met Jared eventually learned: he didn’t play well with others. A trait of Jared’s that would soon prove to be his biggest asset, and his most antagonistic hindrance.

  Chapter 6

  THE BONFIRE

  Ross swerved his truck through the hills and away from Austin. The sun was setting over the wide Texas sky and Julia sat to his right, staring out the window at the seemingly unending rows of trees.

  “Cedars,” Ross said.

  “Huh?” she replied, turning toward him.

  “The trees; they’re cedars.” She looked back at the masses of green foliage that lined the edge of the curvy road. “Texans hate them,” Ross added. “They can’t get rid of them. They’ve tried all of these different approaches, but nothing works.” A few moments later he finished the thought: “Nature always wins.”

  Julia listened and contemplated today’s lesson about Texas. Ross was constantly offering new tidbits of information about her new home state. He was happy to be her on-call historian and twenty-four-hour tour guide, taking her to his favorite coffee shops, burger joints, and parks. He had shown her Pace Bend Lake, one of the best spots to cliff jump. And he’d cited innumerable facts about local buildings and sights.

  Ross had introduced her to his family, and she had started to grow close to his sister, Cally (though their mother was somewhat cold to Ross’s new girlfriend). Ross had even trusted Julia enough to show her his secret collection of Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, which he kept hidden in his old bedroom at his parents’ house. One afternoon he had nervously laid out the dozens of intricately painted fantasy sta
tuettes that had been wrapped safely in boxes and tucked away under his bed.

  Ross appreciated that Julia was so supportive of his ideas, even if some of them didn’t work out so well, like Retracement Capital Management, an investment fund that Ross had tried to start recently, which had gone bust before it had even had a chance to go boom.

  “So these are all your friends from high school?” Julia asked as she turned away from the cedar trees.

  “Yeah,” he replied cheerfully. “These are all kids I hung out with at Westlake.” Julia knew they were getting close, as she could see the orange embers of a fire spitting into the air in front of a small house. “I’m really excited to see them all,” Ross said as he slowed the truck.

  Ross had returned to Texas a few months earlier, settling back into life in Austin as if he had never left. He hadn’t expected to end up back there, but his college obsession with the libertarian club had come at a cost. He had been so focused on the exploration of his new ideals that he had failed the candidacy exam for his Ph.D. program, where he was supposed to continue his research in the “growth of EuO thin films by molecular beam epitaxy.” But there was some serendipity in his failing the exam. All those hours talking politics had made him realize that there was, at least for him, more to life than physics. So he took his master’s and went south again. He had persuaded nineteen-year-old Julia to drop out of school and follow him. Yet for both of them the transition had been bittersweet.

  For Julia, leaving Pennsylvania, where she had lived for so long, and going to a state that seemed—largely and without apology—racist and staunchly Republican had been jarring. But Ross’s corner of the Lone Star State was (mostly) different. While a majority of Texas backed George W. Bush, and were against gays and abortion, the Austin area was more liberal and aligned with her own values, filled with Ron Paul supporters who believed that the government was too big, too powerful, and too in people’s business.