American Kingpin

  For Ross the reintegration had been surprisingly hard. He had left Penn State without any idea of what to do next. He wanted desperately to do something in line with his libertarian ideals. He wanted to do something that would make him money. And, maybe most of all, he wanted to make his parents proud. Finding a career that met all of these goals was, it had become apparent, all but impossible. But that didn’t stop him from talking about his new belief system to anyone who would listen.

  When he bumped into childhood friends at old local bars, rather than revel in distant memories of the past, Ross wanted to talk about America’s future. On a recent visit to Shakespeare’s Pub in downtown Austin, he had spent most of the evening holding court with an old high school friend, describing Austrian economics and arguing that the current political system in America was designed to let the rich take advantage of the disadvantaged. He explained how wonderful it would be to build a seasteading experiment.

  Seasteading, Ross had expounded, was an idea that you could create a community out at sea, away from any governments or regulations, where people could live in open waters without laws and with a free market. Some people had the idea to do this on an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean, with none of the rules and laws that existed in America or elsewhere. After Penn State, Ross had tried to build a video game that would help demonstrate these theories. But it had gone nowhere. Just like all of Ross’s other ideas.

  Julia had been present for a number of these political discussions, and while she sometimes argued clever counterpoints, often she just let Ross have the stage. Tonight, though, as they neared the house with the bonfire outside, there would thankfully be no talk of politics or lawless countries in the middle of the ocean.

  Ross steered off the road and onto a long dirt driveway toward a single-story clapboard house with warm yellow light glowing from the windows. “It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen some of these friends,” he proclaimed as the truck wheezed off. The sun had set and darkness consumed the surrounding mountains; the smell of cinders filled the air as they walked toward a group of revelers.

  “Rossman!” a friend yelled as he embraced his old high school chum.

  “This is my girlfriend, Julia,” Ross said proudly.

  As they joined the group around the fire, people popped open beers. A joint was lit and passed around, and the friends reminisced about high school. “Remember the time Rossman talked his way out of getting in trouble with the cops for smoking that joint?” one story began. It ended with “Ross loved his weed.” Laughter erupted as Julia noted, “He still does.” More stories; more joints; more beers; more laughter. Ross and Julia were having a blast. That was, until the conversation turned to careers. One friend offered up that he was working for the government now; another said he was an engineer. One talked about starting his own business.

  “What about you, Rossman?” A Texas drawl came from the other side of the fire. “Where are you working these days?”

  Ross was silent for a moment. Tension consumed him as he peered at Julia. This was the last question on earth he wanted to deal with right now. “I don’t really have a job,” he said.

  “That’s cool,” a friend sassed. “How’d you pull that off?”

  The entire group around the fire grew quiet, listening.

  Ross explained that he had taken on a part-time job managing a nonprofit called Good Wagon Books, where he was helping out his old buddy Donny. Good Wagon went door to door through Austin collecting old books, then sold them online. Whatever couldn’t be hawked on the Internet was donated to local prisons. It didn’t pay much, so he subsidized his few expenses trading stocks, and had some more money saved from selling a small rental house he’d bought while he was at Penn State. (His frugal lifestyle, in which he spent most of college essentially living for free, had enabled him to save up enough money from his job as a teacher’s assistant at Penn State to purchase, then sell, a tiny home in town.) Around the bonfire he told his friends that he’d been living on those winnings for the past few months.

  What he didn’t tell them, though, was that he had given up day-trading because it wasn’t profitable, and the few times he had made some money, he had hated the inordinate regulations and taxes that Uncle Sam applied to investors. He also didn’t tell them that he had failed his Ph.D. exam or that he had despised renting his house out to college students because of all the inconsequential problems that he was forced to deal with as a landlord. And he certainly didn’t tell them that the gaming simulation he had been building for months, which would simulate a seasteading project, had failed, as no one wanted to purchase it. He didn’t mention all those odd jobs he had done off Craigslist to make a few dollars, including editing science papers. He didn’t say that everything he had done had felt like a complete failure to him. One brilliant idea after another that no one else thought was brilliant.

  The subject, thankfully, changed as people told stories from a decade earlier. While Ross laughed, he appeared embarrassed by what had just happened. Sure, his friends had mundane nine-to-five jobs, but they had jobs. And what did Ross have on his résumé? Two degrees and a series of dead ends. He wanted so badly to have an impact. To do something or build something that was bigger than a nine-to-five.

  It was late by the time Ross and Julia hugged everyone good-bye and slipped back into the truck for the drive back to Austin. As Ross slammed his car door closed and pulled his seat belt across his chest, Julia could sense something wasn’t right. The car reversed down the driveway and onto the winding road.

  “Nothing I’ve done has worked out,” he lamented. “I really haven’t accomplished anything great.” The cedar trees zipped by in the darkness.

  “Oh, honey,” she replied, “it’s okay. You’re trying different things. You’ll find—”

  Ross spoke over Julia. “I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I’ve tried to start all of these different things and nothing has worked.”

  “It will. You just have to—”

  He continued speaking as if he were alone in the truck. “I want to see some results,” he said. “I want to build something that is really successful.”

  “You just have to keep trying.”

  She was right, as Ross was about to see.

  Chapter 7

  THE SILK ROAD

  Stuff, to Ross, was just that: stuff. He had no interest in any of it.

  But there was one object Ross couldn’t live without: his laptop. That rectangular clamshell was, in many respects, Ross’s life. All of the files and folders it contained made up a map of his brilliant and, to many, enigmatic mind. And it was on that very computer that, on a late summer morning in 2010, Ross began working on a project that was going to change everything.

  He had recently moved into an apartment with Julia, a live/work space in downtown Austin with shiny concrete floors. Julia had started a new business, which she called Vivian’s Muse, where she photographed half-naked women for their husbands. Her pitch was simple: What do you get the man who has everything? Sensual pictures of his wife, almost nude. And so, several days a week Julia would set up candles throughout the main room of the apartment, play sensual techno music, and snap thousands of boudoir pictures.

  In the adjacent bedroom, as Ross would get to work on his latest project, he could hear the pop! pop! pop! of the camera flash and Julia commanding her muse, “Stick your ass in the air,” and “Now act like you’re having an orgasm!”

  Their bedroom, where Ross often sat to work, was its usual mess, with Julia’s crumpled-up jeans, discarded dresses, and underwear littering the floor. When they weren’t working, they spent hours under the covers, snuggling or watching TV shows on Ross’s laptop.

  The latest show they had become obsessed with was Breaking Bad. They would cuddle on the bed, warmed by the glow of Ross’s screen, as Walter White transformed into the terrifying and mysterious drug kingpi
n Heisenberg, a man who justified his evil along intellectual lines. Ross liked the drama, and it was hard not to appreciate what Heisenberg had done. Once an underachieving, largely browbeaten high school chemistry teacher, Walter White found in drugs the best way to express his technical brilliance as a chemist and businessperson. What he did may have been terrible and destructive, but he did it with such beauty and so adroitly that, to him at least, the very sin was absolved by the manner in which it was carried out.

  Still, Ross thought the story line was a bit far-fetched. “That would never happen in real life,” he said to Julia.

  When he wasn’t watching the show, Ross was now tinkering with his new idea in their Austin bedroom: an anonymous Web site where you could buy or sell anything imaginable.

  The genesis of this concept had been lodged in Ross’s mind for some time. Just another one of the daydreams he hoped to build in the future. The only problem was, when he had first had this particular aha moment a year earlier, the technology he needed to realize it simply hadn’t existed.

  At the time, he had contacted a man he’d met online who went by the nickname Arto. They had exchanged a few e-mails, with Ross asking Arto if it would be possible to build such an anonymous online store (primarily for illegal drugs, which Ross didn’t think should be illegal) that the government would have no control over.

  Arto, who was clearly an expert on such matters, explained that most of the technology needed to make this idea happen existed. There was a Web browser called Tor, which enabled people to slip behind a curtain online into another, separate Internet—one where the U.S. government couldn’t track people because, thanks to Tor, everyone became invisible. Unlike the normal Internet, where Ross’s every move was stored in databases by Facebook or Google or Comcast, on this side of the Internet, called the Dark Web, you simply couldn’t be found.

  But there were complicating factors to Ross’s idea. Specifically, in 2009 there wasn’t a good way to pay for these things anonymously online. Cash was too risky, and credit cards would leave evidence of someone buying a bag of cocaine from an illegal drug Web site.

  For inspiration, Arto suggested that Ross should read a relatively unknown novel titled A Lodging of Wayfaring Men. The novel tells a tale of a group of libertarian freedom seekers who create an alternate online society on the Internet that operates using its own digital currency, free from government control. In the book this online world grows so quickly that the U.S. government becomes petrified by its power. FBI agents are sent out to try to stop the Web site before it destroys the very fabric of society.

  Arto’s advice was remarkably inspiring to Ross, but the logistical issues remained. Specifically, that there wasn’t a way to pay for drugs on such a Web site.

  And so, for a year, the idea sat on a shelf in Ross’s mind.

  That was, until now. Ross had come across a technology that had recently emerged called Bitcoin. It was being billed as a new form of digital cash that was, from the research he had done, completely untraceable. Anyone in the world could use it to buy and sell anything without leaving digital fingerprints behind.

  The people (or person) who had created this new technology were anonymous, but the idea was simple: While you needed dollars to buy things in America, pounds in England, yen in Japan, or rupees in India, this new Bitcoin currency was meant to be used all around the world and specifically on the Internet. And just like cash, it was untraceable. To get some Bitcoins, you could exchange them online in the same way you could go to the airport and exchange dollars for euros. It was the missing piece Ross had been waiting for to build his experimental world with no rules.

  So in the summer of 2010, while Julia was photographing naked women, Ross Ulbricht, the failed physicist who wanted so badly to make a difference in the world, sat down at his beloved laptop to realize the idea that had been lodged in his mind for so long. A Web site that would be a free and open marketplace where people from all over the planet could buy anything and everything. Things that they couldn’t currently get their hands on because of the restrictions of the U.S. government—most important, drugs. As his fingers touched the keyboard and code appeared on his computer screen, he daydreamed that the site could potentially grow quickly. So quickly that the government would become petrified by its power. It could be living proof, Ross fantasized, that legalizing drugs was the best way to stop violence and oppression in the world. If it worked, it would change the very fabric of society forever.

  Sure, he wanted to make money. That was the libertarian way. But he wanted to free people too. There were millions of souls crammed into jails across the country because of drugs, mostly inconsequential drugs like weed and magic mushrooms. A vile and putrid prison system kept those people locked away; lives destroyed because the government wanted to tell people what they could and could not do with their own bodies.

  This new Web site he was working on could change that.

  Coming up with a name for his store was a challenge, but he finally settled on the Silk Road, a title borrowed from the ancient Chinese trade route of the Han dynasty.

  The biggest challenge now was finding the time to actually work on the project, given that he was still involved with Good Wagon Books and had even taken over most of the operation. Still, he had hired a couple of employees to do most of the book work, so Ross could hole up in his messy bedroom and toil away on the site, work that was difficult, even for someone as capable as Ross.

  He spent innumerable hours writing front-end code, back-end code, and code that helped sew those digital dialects together. Ross was teaching himself all of these programming languages on the fly. He was technically doing the equivalent of building eBay and Amazon on his own, without any help and without any knowledge. When he got stuck, he was truly baffled as to how to fix a programming problem. It wasn’t as if he could post a job listing online looking for someone to help him build a Web site that sold drugs and other illegal contraband.

  For now, though, he was determined to build the site on his own, even if it was slow going. His idea, which now seemed like the obvious path to push his liberation ideals, might actually turn into something.

  But there was one thing Ross hadn’t figured out yet. Where was he going to get drugs for his new drug-dealing Web site?

  Chapter 8

  ROSS THE FARMER

  He had to tell someone or, more important, he had to actually show someone. But he couldn’t; he just couldn’t—it was too dangerous. This conundrum gnawed at Ross. So after weeks of deliberation he knew exactly who it would be. “I’m going to take you somewhere,” Ross said to Julia on a late-November afternoon. “But I’m going to have to blindfold you.”

  “Blindfold me?” she exulted as she jumped up from her chair, delighted by the possibility that something kinky was about to happen. “Great!”

  He clarified very quickly that this wasn’t sexual. “The blindfold is for your own protection,” he said, worry spreading across his face. “It’s so you can never lead anyone back to where I’m going to take you.”

  Still, Julia felt a thrill as Ross slipped some black fabric over her head, then pulled tightly to shut out any light from around her eyes. He wasn’t his usual phlegmatic self; he seemed nervous and deep in thought. They walked in silence out of the apartment, Ross gripping Julia’s arm to help her into his pickup truck. Ross could see everything, but Julia could only hear. There was the sound of keys that jingled like a dog’s collar. The click of the truck’s door opening. A thump as it slammed shut. An engine rumbled. Finally the vehicle edged forward into the darkness for Julia, daylight for Ross.

  “Where are we going?” Julia asked again as she looked around at the shadows.

  “I told you,” he whispered. “It’s a surprise. You’ll see.”

  Ross didn’t say another word as he drove through Austin at dusk. Julia sensed he was concerned, so she let them sit in silence.

/>   They had been getting along so well lately. On weekends they would head over to his parents’ house for dinner, which—unsurprisingly—was different from any family dinner she had encountered.

  While many Texan kinfolk would spend mealtimes talking about football and F-150 trucks, the Ulbrichts talked about economics, libertarian politics, and the pitiful state of society. Ross’s father, Kirk, a soft-spoken native of South Texas, always managed to one-up Ross’s arguments by calmly pointing out that his son’s beliefs were a tad too idealistic, and here was why. Lyn, Ross’s hard-nosed Bronx-born mother, would step in and defend Ross’s view, supplementing his argument with her more rigid outlook. Kirk’s goal was to teach his son to think through every side of an argument; Lyn’s was to push Ross’s intelligence, with the hope that he would live up to his incredible potential. She had given up on her own dream of becoming a journalist, and her hope of a grand future now lay in the hands of her golden son. This fact was not lost on Ross.

  Maybe this was why Ross had been working so hard of late.

  Over the past few weeks Julia had seen him disappear for hours on end, not really saying what he was up to. She had imagined he was working at the Good Wagon Books warehouse or (more likely) toiling away on the Web site he was now obsessed with. He spent what seemed like days at a time on his laptop, staring intently at the screen. Maybe, she had reasoned, he was hanging out with friends in the park or volunteering at a nearby nonprofit, something Ross often did with his spare time.

  But, as Julia was about to find out when the vehicle finally stopped, Ross had been up to something very different recently. She wondered where they were as the truck’s engine hummed off. Maybe it was near Highland Mall or Rundberg Lane, or they had driven away from the downtown and were near Bastrop State Park, outside the city. She heard Ross get out of the truck; the keys clinked, a door slammed, and he grabbed her by the arms, helping her onto the pavement.