American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  While he was exhausted by all this work, he was also elated that people were finally using something he had built. And by March 2011 he had already made a few thousand dollars in revenue.

  Now his biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to manage his time between his drug Web site, his book business, and Julia.

  As luck would have it, one of those three things was about to vanish into a plume of dust. As he worked away on his laptop amid the empty silence of his office, he was momentarily interrupted by a ferocious BOOM! that erupted from inside the warehouse. It was so loud and terrifying that he stopped breathing for a moment as more bangs detonated inside the space.

  His mind spun in a nanosecond with all the possibilities of what was happening. Maybe it was a raid by the police, a battering ram slamming through the door to stop the creator of the tiny Silk Road. Maybe it was a gas line explosion. Ross stood there panicked for a moment, fearing that all those hours of coding and mushroom farming had been in vain and that he was destined to be the underachieving failure that he dreaded.

  Then, as soon as the thunderous claps arrived, they were gone. And in their place there was nothing but stark silence.

  Ross’s heartbeat started to slow slightly as he built up the courage to carefully walk around the corner into the warehouse to see what the noise had been.

  There he saw that, one by one, like giant dominoes, the bookshelves of Good Wagon Books, which weighed thousands of pounds, had toppled. What he had heard was the sound of snapping wood and a mountain of books piling atop one another. It looked like a giant hand had reached in from the roof and swirled the room around.

  He surveyed the damage. The mystery novels lay on top of the computer-programming books. The science fiction and romance section of Good Wagon Books was crushed beneath everything. It quickly dawned on Ross that when he had built the bookshelves, with his mind clearly preoccupied by the Silk Road, he must have forgotten to tighten several screws. The result of those actions could have killed him.

  He quickly rushed back into his office to call Julia and tell her the story. But as he told her about the noises and the mess, Ross also realized that the books falling was not actually an inauspicious event that would cause him more stress and turmoil. This was serendipitous. Maybe it was a sign from God, fate, or sheer luck. But it meant that Ross now had an excuse to shut down the book business and let his part-time employees go. He could tell everyone that rebuilding the shelves and reorganizing the books would just be too laborious. He could do all of this without seeming like he was giving up.

  Now, rather than split his time among the Silk Road, Good Wagon Books, and Julia, he could focus on just two of those things. Though one was about to put the other in jeopardy.

  Chapter 11

  THE GAWKER ARTICLE

  The Café Grumpy coffee shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, looked like every other hipster enclave in America. Laptop screens glowed while headphones blared silently into people’s ears. The men and women who sat sipping overpriced coffee wore the uniform of hipster Brooklyn: skintight jeans and bohemian tattoos that crawled up their arms and across their fingers. Outside was the industrial wasteland of McGuinness Avenue, the thoroughfare that connected Brooklyn and Queens above the sewage-laced Newtown Creek. Chop shops and gas stations lined the streets. A few trendy condos were going up—a sign that this subset of creative types, who huddled around their laptops each day, were an endangered species too. For now, though, they were the linchpins of the gentrifying neighborhood, this rump state, and Café Grumpy was its capital.

  Most of the people in that coffee shop were writers trying to learn how to blog, or bloggers trying to learn how to write. A new class of creatives, living their own unique American dream, freelancing and hoping to be read by someone, somewhere.

  Amid these writers sat Adrian Chen, a young Asian man, seemingly lost in his own world at his laptop as he scrolled through a long discussion on a Web forum. The chatter he was reading, with skepticism and disbelief, was about a Web site on the Dark Web that was being labeled the “Amazon for drugs.”

  On the forum some people complained that this Web site, called the Silk Road, was dangerous—that selling heroin on the Internet could kill people who didn’t know how to use “H.” Or that this new drug bazaar could give the new digital currency, Bitcoin, a bad name—while others contended that this site might make buying drugs safer and that it perfectly took advantage of online anonymity in a way that had never been done before.

  But Adrian thought something entirely different: This has to be a hoax. After all, he knew the underbelly of the Internet better than almost any writer alive. He had been a blogger for Gawker, a New York–based gossip site, for almost two years. While working the weekend and graveyard shifts, he had become synonymous with finding and writing about trolls and hackers online. He trod through the dark, dangerous side of the Web and brought back stories of people doing crazy, fucked-up things.

  But was anyone really crazy enough to set up a Web site like this? he wondered. Adrian knew there was only one way to find out. He downloaded Tor and navigated to the Silk Road, and sure enough, someone was.

  You could buy any drug imaginable, he saw—by his count 343 different kinds of drugs, to be precise. Black tar heroin, Afghan hash, some Sour 13 weed, and ecstasy. All for street prices; in some instances less expensive than street. You simply traded some cash for Bitcoins, traded some Bitcoins for drugs, and waited for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver your drugs.

  Adrian was skeptical, though, that if the Silk Road was real, anyone would actually buy drugs on the site. He registered an account on the forums under the username Adrian802 (802 was his area code from Connecticut, where he had grown up). He then posted a query asking if anyone would mind being anonymously interviewed for a story he was going to write about this defiant Web site.

  He received some responses, then a man’s phone number, and while pacing on the sidewalk outside Grumpy, he interviewed Mark, a software developer, about what it was like to buy drugs on the Internet.

  “It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said over the phone, explaining that he’d ordered ten tabs of LSD from someone in Canada, and four days later the mailman dropped the acid off at his house.

  Another person responded to Adrian’s query too: the person who apparently ran the Silk Road.

  • • •

  As the Silk Road had grown, Ross’s anxiety had expanded at an equal clip. When he had first posted anonymous messages on forums less than five months earlier, he had been oblivious to just how quickly it would drive people to the site. At first it was a trickle of customers, a few dozen here or there, but since he had shut down Good Wagon Books, his drug Web site had rapidly grown. Hundreds of people were now selling drugs on the site, and thousands were buying.

  Ross was making money from his enterprise too. The mushrooms, most of which he had offloaded, had turned into a hefty profit of tens of thousands of dollars.

  All of this came with a mixture of exhilaration and fear, and Ross had been in a constant state of worry, fretful that maybe Julia was right, that he could be tied to his creation. He constantly had to reassure himself that no one would ever be able to connect him with the Silk Road.

  That was, except for two people.

  Weeks earlier, Ross had been left with no choice but to tell his old college buddy Richard that he was the founder of the Amazon of drugs, as Richard had refused to help anymore without an explanation. “Tell me about this or leave me out of it,” Richard wrote to Ross over chat. “I’m officially forbidding you from mentioning your secret project to me again unless you’re going to reveal it.” Without Richard’s expertise, Ross was completely and utterly “fudged.” If the site went down, Ross would be abandoned alone in a dark and complex maze. So he was left with no choice but to come clean.

  At first Richard was shocked. After Ross explained his
thinking behind the site, Richard agreed to continue to help. It didn’t hurt that Ross gave his old pal a few baggies of his specialty magic mushrooms as a big thank-you. And that Richard started shopping on the site, buying ecstasy, weed, Vicodin, and some prescription antibiotics. (Richard was a germophobe, so he relished the ability to get medicine without a doctor’s note.) And finally, Richard was confident (given that he had helped write the code) that nothing could be tied back to them.

  But reassuring Julia that he wasn’t in danger was a completely different challenge for Ross. Over the past two months the two had started fighting constantly about the Silk Road. There were now hundreds of people signing up for accounts every week, and Julia worried that Ross, whom she one day hoped to marry, could be caught and spend the rest of his life in prison.

  “It’s secure,” Ross assured Julia, explaining how uncrackable Tor was and how Bitcoins were completely anonymous. “It’s safe. Trust me, no one can ever figure it out it’s me behind the site.”

  But the cautionary voice of Julia gnawed at him and, to be sure that he was covering his tracks properly and knowing full well how limited his programming skills were, Ross decided to explore hiring other experts (besides Richard) to rewrite some new security protocols on the site. He posted a job listing on the Silk Road, and some antigovernment programmers were happy to help in the battle to stop the Man, part time and for a fee.

  Ross’s Web site hadn’t received any press yet, which was surprising given the chatter on some forums, though he wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for any. Yet the time had come. Someone with the username Adrian802 had been sniffing around the site, telling Silk Road customers he was working on a story for Gawker about the Silk Road.

  Ross knew he couldn’t stop the story, so he figured it was best to message Adrian802. He was polite and grateful for the interest, voicing his belief that the Silk Road was making it safer for people to buy drugs. “Our community is amazing,” Ross wrote under the guise of the anonymous administrator of the Silk Road. Then, completely oblivious to the consequences, Ross decided to go full bore with Adrian802 and took the opportunity to get his libertarian message out, explaining that the site was going to show the government that it was flat-out wrong to deny people their rights. “Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market,” he wrote to Adrian.

  He didn’t foresee that this kind of message would have vast and grim consequences.

  • • •

  At 4:20 p.m. on June 1, 2011, Adrian sat at Café Grumpy, sipped his black coffee, and watched as his blog post about the Silk Road went live. The title read: THE UNDERGROUND WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN BUY ANY DRUG IMAGINABLE. The article began, “Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.”

  Chapter 12

  A BULL’S-EYE ON MY BACK

  What’s wrong, baby?” Julia asked as she lay in bed next to Ross, admiring his jawline. Ross didn’t respond to her. He was too busy reading a news article about the Silk Road.

  He knew there might be a hostile response from the government after the article from Adrian Chen at Gawker, published a couple of days earlier. But this was a far worse response than his imagination had ever come up with.

  With trepidation he clicked to play a video in the article he was reading. There, in a small rectangular window, stood Senator Chuck Schumer at a press conference podium, a vexed look on his face. To the senator’s right and left, two large, oversize printouts of the Silk Road Web site rested on display stands. Below him, on the wooden rostrum, the blue, white, and gold insignia of the U.S. Senate was clear for the press corps, and Ross, to see.

  “It’s a certifiable one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen,” Schumer said to a gaggle of press. “It’s more brazen than anything else by light-years.”

  Oh heck!

  This really wasn’t good. Sure, Ross wanted recognition and attention. But this was more than he had ever anticipated, especially so early in the life of his drug bazaar.

  The video cut to a scene of Schumer sitting in front of a computer, Ross’s drug site on the screen. The senator’s finger traversed the Silk Road as he listed off all of the goodies that were for sale. “Heroin, opium, cannabis, ecstasies, psychedelics, stimulants,” Schumer said (briefly showing how out of touch he was with the topic at hand as he made “ecstasy” plural). The sound of camera flashes burst—pop! pop! pop!—as Schumer said in disbelief, “You name it, they have it!”

  Ross felt sick as he read the article that accompanied the news clip, which noted that both Schumer of New York and Joe Manchin, then the junior senator from West Virginia, had asked the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration to shut down the Amazon of drugs—immediately.

  Fudge! Friggin’ fudge! Ross had picked a fight with the biggest bully on earth, and the bully was about to punch back.

  “Look,” Ross said, leaning against the back of the bed as he replayed the clip for Julia. “They’ve painted a bull’s-eye on my back.”

  “Ross,” Julia said, petrified as she watched, “this isn’t good.”

  The attention of the U.S. Senate was the last thing he needed at this moment. In a month, or six, maybe he could handle it. But not now.

  Over the past few days, since the Gawker article had been published, an unremitting avalanche of press had followed in its wake. Ross’s Web site had transformed from almost invisible to mainstream as it entered the national news cycle with shocking velocity. Established media brands were all over the story. The Atlantic picked it up; NPR talked about it on air; and TV news outlets, including ABC and NBC, produced segments devoted to it (“They call it the Amazon of drugs . . .”). Not to mention the hundreds of blog posts, discussions on drug forums and social media, and articles on libertarian Web sites.

  Despite the mainstream press, most people who read about the site still didn’t believe you could actually buy drugs on the Internet and have them mailed to your home. This had to be one of those Nigerian e-mail scams or a place for law enforcement to lure unsuspecting idiots who were going to be swept up in a massive online drug bust. But still, idiots or not, thousands of people downloaded Tor and signed up for the Silk Road to see. It couldn’t hurt to look, right?

  Ross watched with a mixture of dread and delight as his databases filled up and the site slowed down. He barely slept a wink the night after the article was published, lying awake staring at his laptop or sitting in his ergonomic chair in the bedroom, watching sign-ups from all over the world.

  The day after the Gawker article, Ross got up, groggy and on edge, and was greeted by a total catastrophe. No, the site hadn’t been shut down by law enforcement. Or knocked off-line by hackers. Nothing like that. It was much worse.

  While some people had simply come to the Silk Road to window-shop, others were actually buying and selling drugs. And every time someone purchased something, some of Ross’s Bitcoins vanished in the transaction. What the hell is going on? There must be a bug in the code. His personal profits, which were now in the double-digit thousands of dollars, were literally dwindling by hundreds of dollars every few hours. Ross had to figure out how to fix a problem he hadn’t even known existed.

  It was sickening.

  After digging through his code for hours trying to find the error, Ross realized he had originally built the Silk Road using a standard piece of code called “bitcoind,” which connected his payment system. Now he was discovering that he had created that interface improperly. He just had no idea where the mistake was in his code. All he knew was that he had essentially built a cash register where money fell out of the bottom into the ether whenever he opened it. And right now, as slews of new customers came to the site, that regis
ter was opening and closing at a staggering rate.

  When he did the math, at the speed with which people were buying drugs on the site, the Silk Road was fast approaching insolvency. He would soon be the first person in history to start an underground drug Web site on the Internet and the first person in history to see it go bankrupt because he had written so much shitty code.

  Ross had no choice but to start with the problems he could manage. He made the painful decision to shut off new user sign-ups to the Silk Road, which would help the servers handle the onslaught of visitors, albeit slightly. Next up was figuring out why his money was disappearing with every transaction. This would require rewriting programming language he clearly didn’t know how to write in the first place.

  For the next few days Ross barely slept, and ate even less. Julia tried to keep him afloat with his favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but after delivering one to his side, she would come back hours later to see the sandwich sitting untouched next to his laptop.

  Through it all, anxiety pecked away at his insides.

  After almost a week of these major issues, after the site had gone down and the senators had declared war on the Silk Road and its founder, the reality of what he was doing, and what the consequences were, started to settle in.

  “They’re looking for me,” Ross said to Julia in an almost catatonic and exhausted state one evening.

  “No shit they are looking for you!” she responded.

  She had seen Ross like this before, when he had been caught growing mushrooms months earlier. A strange look of excitement and fear had shown in his face back then too. Almost as if there were two different people inhabiting Ross’s body. One was a timid and sweet boy who truly wanted to help people and make the world a safer place; the other, a recalcitrant rebel who was ready to take on and fight the entire U.S. government. Sweet Ross and Rebel Ross.