American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  This had happened just two weeks earlier, when DPR had been faced with a query on the site that no one had ever posed to Ross in his debate clubs back at Penn State.

  “Question for you,” one of his employees had asked at the time. “Do we allow selling kidneys and livers?”

  Well, that was something Ross had never imagined people might want to hawk on the Silk Road. “Is it listed?” he replied. “Or someone wants to sell?”

  The employee then forwarded an e-mail that had come into the Silk Road’s support page from someone who said they wanted to sell kidneys, livers, and other body parts; according to the anonymous sender, the sales of these internal organs would “all be consensual” between the sellers and the buyers.

  On the black market a person’s kidney could sell for more than $260,000 (though a kidney from a Chinese man or woman would go for only $60,000), and a good liver was $150,000. Almost every part of a person’s body was for sale, and for a hefty profit. Bone marrow, for example, sold for as much as $23,000 a gram (compared with $60 a gram for cocaine). A family who couldn’t get that for their dying son in the broken U.S. health-care system would happily pay for it on the Dark Web.

  “Yes, if the source consents then it is ok,” DPR wrote, then noted to his employee that “morals are easy when you understand the non-aggression principle,” citing the same libertarian argument he had used so many times in his debates at Penn State. Anything goes in a free market, the principle states, as long as you’re not violent toward anyone else without cause. (If someone tries to harm you, then you have every right to defend yourself and your personal property, Dread explained. An eye for an eye was the way of the libertarian world.) Selling a liver or spleen on a Web site was entirely moral and just, he noted.

  In addition to allowing organs on the site, the Dread Pirate Roberts had also recently approved the sale of poisons on the Silk Road.

  “So uhh we have a vendor selling cyanide,” wrote another of Dread’s employees. “Not sure where we stand on this, he’s not listing it as a poison, but its only the most well known assassination and suicide poison out there.” The employee followed up with “lol.”

  DPR asked for a link to the sales page. The listing pointed out that while cyanide could be used to kill yourself (in about seven to nine seconds)—the person selling the acid had noted that with each order they were including a free copy of the e-book The Final Exit, which was a how-to guide for suicides. Cyanide did also have some legitimate uses, the seller pointed out, like cleaning gold and silver, and was “the perfect medicine to treat leprosy.”

  After a couple of minutes deliberating, DPR said to the employee, “I think we’ll allow it.” And then he reiterated the site’s mantra: “It’s a substance, and we want to err on the side of not restricting things.”

  The Silk Road, after all, was just the platform—no different from Facebook or Twitter or eBay—on which users communicated and exchanged ideas and currency. So who was DPR to err on the side of anything but yes? It wasn’t as if Twitter dictated what kind of opinions people could and could not write in the little box at the top of the screen. If you wanted to spew brilliance or idiocy in 140 characters, then so be it. It was your God-given right to say what you wanted on the Internet, in the same way it was your God-given right to buy or sell whatever you wanted and put it into your body—if you chose.

  That had been Ross’s goal with weapons too when he started the Armory, though he recently had been forced to shut that site down because it had proven too difficult to get guns through the U.S. Postal Service. As a result, not enough people were willing to buy weapons on the site, so he reinstated the sale of these arms on the Silk Road (as a temporary solution) while he explored new ways to help people traffic them back and forth anonymously. To the Dread Pirate Roberts, whether the merchandise was guns, drugs, poisons, or body parts, it was the people’s right to buy and sell it.

  “Absolutely,” the employee replied in agreement. “This is the black market after all :).”

  “It is,” Ross responded, “and we are bringing order and civility to it.”

  While these decisions were still difficult for Ross to make, the line where Ross ended and DPR began was beginning to blur. And just like other ambitious CEOs who ran other start-ups around San Francisco, he was unable to see how a single decision, made from behind a computer, could trickle down and affect an untold number of real, living human beings.

  I think we’ll allow it.

  Back in that metal box at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, René began speaking again, looking at his friend Ross and noting that in San Francisco, “it feels like we’re caught up in a moment.”

  Ross, returning from another one of his daydreams, agreed. “I get that feeling as well,” he said. “I feel like the world is in flux.” It was, and in many ways the people around them were causing all of the changes.

  For the next thirty minutes the conversation between Ross and René bounced from family and friends to drugs (and how much Ross had loved them as a teen). Then Ross talked about his almost-fiancée from Texas, and how the experience of her cheating had battered him emotionally.

  “Are you at all jaded?” René asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Ross replied. “Big time.”

  René then went on to explain that he had experienced an epiphany of late, that we all work so hard in our jobs, and for what? “There is no level of success that would make me feel happy all the time,” he reflected. “Those little achievements are little fleeting moments.”

  Ross scratched his beard, seemingly disagreeing with his friend. “I imagine there is some silver lining to . . . pushing yourself to the limit,” Ross said. “I’ve had similar experiences with my work, where that becomes everything, more important than anything.”

  They then started to wrap up their recording. But first, before they said good-bye, René asked his friend where he would like to be twenty years from now.

  “I want to have had a substantial positive impact on the future of humanity by that time,” Ross remarked.

  Then René asked, “Do you think you’re going to live forever?”

  “I think it’s a possibility,” Ross declared into the microphone. “I honestly do; I think I might live forever in some form.”

  Chapter 40

  THE WHITE HOUSE IN UTAH

  The little house on East 600 North Street in Spanish Fork, Utah, had seen better days. The white slats of siding were chipped from years of neglect, as was the wooden fence on the edge of the property. In all directions small white steeples rose into the Utah sky, offering endless places of worship. This was, after all, Mormon country, home of the Latter-day Saints.

  On a Thursday morning in mid-January 2013, every few minutes the silence was punctured by a car passing through the nearby intersection. And in the distance there was the echoing rattle of the wind irritating a dozen or so ragged American flags that lined the nearby streets.

  But there was something unusual about the street that day. An uncommon number of cars were parked along the road, including a windowless white van that sat across the street from the house. If a passerby could have seen inside the van, he or she would have spotted a group of men checking the chambers of their semiautomatic machine guns while others placed masks over their faces and adjusted their bulletproof vests.

  Just after 11:00 a.m., right as the HuHot Mongolian Grill across the street from the white house opened its doors for the daily $8.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, a man emerged from the white van wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a dark blue jacket with a U.S. Postal Service emblem on its sleeve. He walked up to the little white house with a small package in his hand and knocked loudly. “Hello!” he yelled as his fist thudded against the screen door. “Anyone home?”

  No one answered, but it was apparent that someone was indeed inside. The man with the postal jacket dropped the package onto the decrepit checke
red welcome mat on the stoop and headed back toward the white van.

  Nearby, Special Agent Carl Force of the DEA watched this spectacle from an unmarked police car. “He’s not going to fall for this,” Carl said to another much older agent sitting next to him in the car.

  “Give it some time,” the older agent said. “He’ll come out.”

  Carl waited, savoring the serenity of the moment: the vast open sky and the flapping flags, all surrounded by the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains and the sweeping emptiness beyond. Carl had ended up there, as had all the other men with him, as a result of his online persona Nob having concocted a brilliant plan to have the Dread Pirate Roberts find a buyer for a kilo of cocaine. In no time at all DPR had connected him with a dealer on the site, and after agreeing to the $27,000 price, Carl had been given the address of a man named Curtis Green, who worked for DPR and who had agreed to take possession of the coke as a middleman for the buyer.

  As soon as the deal was struck, the Marco Polo task force had to scramble to get things in order. Thankfully, Carl had a connection at the Major Crimes Unit in Utah, which had agreed to loan the agents the kilo of cocaine from the evidence vault for their sting operation.

  A few days later Carl picked up the coke and a Priority Mail package. Before placing the drugs inside, he drove over the package in a truck a few times to make it look like it had been through the mail. The agents decided to do a “controlled delivery” of the drugs, with one guy posing as a postal worker to drop off the package at Green’s house and then, hopefully, arrest him. But given that this was the Marco Polo task force, the operation was a mess from the moment they landed in Utah. In particular, the agent tasked with dressing up like a mailman had decided not to dress up like an actual mailman. He just lazily slipped the postal jacket over his normal clothes for the delivery.

  “This guy looks nothing like a postal worker,” Carl said to the gruff agent next to him as they watched the fake postal worker slip back into the white van.

  A few minutes went by, and finally the door to the dilapidated house creaked open and a heavyset man with short, dark hair emerged, peeking out of the doorway like a timid and lost animal. This was Curtis Green, who appeared to be in his early forties and who had a visible look of worry across his face. Green, Carl knew, was one of the key lieutenants in the Dread Pirate Roberts’s vast drug network, spending his days holed up in the house, brokering deals between buyers and sellers and resolving disputes when transactions went wrong.

  Green looked directly toward the white van, then down at the package, and walked cautiously out onto the porch. A pink walking stick in hand, he hobbled toward the parcel, then leaned down to pick it up and examine it. The package was a Priority Mail box, no bigger than a brick, and there was no return address anywhere. He wore a fanny pack around his waist, and it shifted slightly as he ambled across the porch. Seemingly deciding he wanted nothing to do with the package, Green threw the parcel into a trash bin on the lawn and limped back inside.

  “What the fuck?” Carl exclaimed. The men in the van were in disbelief too. What now? They all knew that you can’t arrest someone for throwing a brick of cocaine in the garbage. As they contemplated what to do, Green reappeared, slowly peering out of the doorway as he had a few minutes earlier. This time he retrieved the package from the garbage and brought it inside.

  The door clicked closed behind Green. It was go time.

  It took only a few seconds for the back of the white van to burst open, which prompted a cascade of subsequent thuds from the doors of the cars parked around the corner. Dozens of men from the local SWAT team and DEA streamed out of the vehicles, with long dark guns drawn, and trampled across the dead grass on the lawn. A black battering ram appeared and slammed into the front door of the little white house. The agents of the Marco Polo task force stormed inside. “On the floor!” one of them yelled as Green stood over the now-open package of powder with a pair of scissors in his hand, a plume of cocaine covering his face.

  Green, stuttering, did as he was told, lying down on the ground as quickly as he could. He called out the names of his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, as they yapped at the men with guns. “Keep your hands where we can see them!” an agent yelled. Max, the older of the two dogs, couldn’t handle the mayhem and lost his continence, shitting himself on the living room floor, while Sam, the smaller pup, tried to bite another agent’s shoelaces. On the wall above this chaos there were pictures of Green’s wife and kids and a square decorative tile that offered the welcoming message “If I had known you were coming, I would have cleaned up!”

  Green was searched—the cops found $23,000 in cash stuffed in his fanny pack—and was read his rights. He was visibly petrified, telling the cops he’d do whatever they needed; tell them whatever they wanted to know; show them how Bitcoins worked and the computer he used to log on to the Silk Road.

  The cops in the back of the house rummaged through Green’s drawers, pulling out his wife’s big black dildo that became the butt of several jokes. Other officers went down into the basement, where they found a series of computers linked together for what they were told was Green’s Bitcoin-mining farm. These computers ran software Green had downloaded that constantly crunched numbers trying to find Bitcoins online that he could then turn into real physical cash.

  As the cops rummaged through his stuff, one of the HSI agents from Baltimore took timid Green aside and began questioning him. This left Carl and Shaun Bridges, the Secret Service agent who had tried to set up the meeting with the NSA, to examine Green’s computer. They soon discovered that Green, as an employee of the Silk Road, had a special account on the site with privileges that allowed him to change people’s pass codes and even log others out of their accounts. This was an administrative right that, Green told them, had been granted to him by the Dread Pirate Roberts himself.

  As Carl and Shaun explored Green’s account for evidence that would bring them closer to capturing DPR, they noticed one other feature about Green’s administrative abilities on the site that seemed out of the ordinary. It appeared that Green, as a moderator, also had access to other people’s Bitcoins on the Silk Road. Hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins, to be precise. Green could have easily stolen that money if he wanted to. After all, everyone believed that Bitcoins couldn’t be traced like cash. But Green would never do such a thing, fearing a vicious reprisal from the Dread Pirate Roberts. Neither, one would think, would federal agents with the Marco Polo task force who had taken an oath to protect citizens, “so help me God.”

  But in the coming days, without the knowledge of anyone else inside that little house on East 600 North Street in Spanish Fork, Utah, or within the U.S. government, Shaun Bridges of the Secret Service was about to do the unthinkable. He started tinkering with the computer that belonged to Green and furtively siphoning $350,000 out of other people’s accounts on the Silk Road, all using Curtis Green’s log-in credentials. Rather than turning this money in to the U.S. government as evidence, Shaun would instead secretly transfer that $350,000 into his own personal accounts online.

  It didn’t stop there.

  It wouldn’t take long for do-gooder, churchgoing dad Carl Force—completely separately from Shaun Bridges—to start stealing money from the Silk Road too. But rather than purloin the money, as Shaun did, Carl would instead sell information back to the Dread Pirate Roberts in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoins. This information would help Ross Ulbricht stay ahead of law enforcement as they hunted for the leader of the Silk Road.

  Just as he had before, Carl was about to cross the line between covering a criminal and becoming one.

  So help me God.

  Chapter 41

  CURTIS IS TORTURED

  The lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Salt Lake City was as bland and soundless as any other. The carpet was as hard as concrete, and a stale smell of coffee hung in the air. In the corner of the foyer, a televi
sion played with a ticker streaming below the newscaster who read the latest headlines, noting that new home sales in the United States had fallen by 7.8 percent over the previous month, and the economy was again sputtering.

  Upstairs in one of the hotel suites, a pink walking cane lay on the floor. And a few feet away, in the bathroom, the owner of that cane—Curtis Green—was being drowned by a postal worker from the Marco Polo task force. Across from him, as Green’s head was held underwater and his arms flailed about in panic, Carl Force of the DEA stood with a digital camera videotaping this torture.

  It had been a week since the DEA had come into Green’s house with a battering ram, smashing down his front door and scaring the shit (quite literally) out of his poor Chihuahuas. After he had been booked, processed, and let go from the local police precinct, he had gone home, dropped onto the couch, and cried. He reasoned that the next steps would be getting a lawyer, having a court date, and maybe striking a deal with the DEA that would grant him a lesser sentence. But events had played out differently.

  After his arrest the Marco Polo task force returned to Baltimore, and the Mormon boy, Green, had been told to lie low. Carl and the rest of the team had assumed that they would have time to question Green later and could sift through his computer for more evidence in the meantime. But as Carl had learned (as Nob), the Dread Pirate Roberts had figured out that his employee had been arrested.

  Amid a flurry of confusion, Shaun Bridges, Carl Force, and a postal worker from the task force had returned to the Salt Lake City Marriott to question Green, to try to glean what they could while he still had access to his Silk Road files.