American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  The home along Fifteenth Avenue where Ross was subletting wasn’t much to look at. It was a medley of Spanish elements, with a white exterior and brown terra-cotta roof combined with five whatever-was-on-sale-at-Home-Depot-that-week windows in the front of the house. The front door was glass, and the front yard was a pathetic patch of stark green plants that stood about six inches tall.

  Ross, being Ross, didn’t care how things looked. For him it was all about the privacy of the house, which was close to the edge of the city, near the beach.

  • • •

  Agent Ramirez looked at the map on his phone as he pulled up to 2260 Fifteenth Street in San Francisco. He parked and then scanned the building, wondering if “Andrew Ford” was home.

  The house was situated in Duboce Triangle, smack in the middle of the city, and was a long rectangular shape, painted blue and gray on the outside. There was no yard in the front, and the entrance to the house was a thick wooden door. Agent Ramirez spent several hours staking out the place, waiting to see if the man in the fake IDs would walk outside to check his mailbox so they could talk to him. But he never showed up.

  So the agent got out of his cruiser and knocked on the bright blue door with one hand as he held a photo of the fake IDs in the other.

  • • •

  The packages Ross had been waiting for should have arrived days earlier, but they still weren’t there. He had walked down the orange brick steps to check the mailbox daily. But nothing. Of course, he wasn’t looking for mail that had his name on it but rather anything that had been sent to Andrew Ford, the man Ross was subletting his room from, and that had come from Vancouver.

  The Canada Post Web site wasn’t much help, either. When Ross typed in the tracking number he had been given for the packages of fake IDs he had bought, all he could see was that the envelope was “still in transit.”

  • • •

  After Agent Ramirez waited for a few minutes, the door to 2260 Fifteenth Street opened and an older Asian man stepped outside.

  “Hi, my name is Agent Ramirez,” the officer said. “Is Andrew Ford home?”

  The older Asian man looked at Agent Ramirez, assuming that he was trying to sell him something, and tried to shoo him away. “No!” the Asian man yelled angrily. “No! He no live here!”

  The agent asked again. “Andrew Ford?” This time holding up a photo of nine fake IDs, each of which had a picture of Ross Ulbricht on the front. “Is there an Andrew Ford who lives here?”

  “No!” the Asian man vehemently responded, quickly closing the door in his face. “Now go away!”

  • • •

  Just as Ross didn’t talk to his roommates, he chose not to talk to his neighbors, either. He just stayed in his room working on his laptop. If he had talked to the people who lived next to him on Fifteenth Avenue, he would have heard the horror stories about packages getting muddled up in the mail. He might have even heard the tale about the history of the street he lived on: the story about how in the late spring of 1909, the mayor of San Francisco had set up a commission to renumber the houses and roads of the city after years of confusion over the similarity between the streets and avenues. While the commission was started with noble goals, it set entire neighborhoods into feuds with one another, with residents arguing over which streets would be renamed and which would not.

  In the end the numbered streets and the numbered avenues remained unchanged.

  As a result, packages that were being sent to Fifteenth Avenue sometimes ended up at addresses on Fifteenth Street, and envelopes that were mailed to people on Fifteenth Street sometimes ended up at homes along Fifteenth Avenue.

  And in mid-July 2013 an agent from the Department of Homeland Security ended up at the wrong address too, accidentally searching for the man who had purchased nine fake IDs at 2260 Fifteenth Street instead of the address that had been written on the envelope: 2260 Fifteenth Avenue. The address where Ross Ulbricht lived.

  Chapter 53

  THE DECONFLICTION MEETING

  Every year around this time, Gary took the day off from work to celebrate the week in 1977 when the lights went out in New York City—the day he was born. But this year, just a couple of days before his birthday, he was asked to go down to a classified location near Washington, DC, to attend a highly classified and incredibly important meeting. Possibly the most important of his career.

  The gathering, he was told, was a “deconfliction meeting” about the Silk Road, and it would be held by the highest brass at the Department of Justice, the top echelon of the legal system in the United States. Apparently the DOJ had called the meeting because all of the factions of government that were investigating the Silk Road (which included almost all the factions of government) were not playing well together. Agents weren’t sharing evidence. Government resources, aka people’s tax dollars, were being squandered on the investigation. Even people within the same agencies weren’t communicating, with DEA agents in Baltimore not sharing their findings with those in New York and HSI agents in San Francisco not talking to those in Chicago or Baltimore.

  There was also relentless bickering among agencies. These squabbles were routine within any big investigation, but with the Silk Road they were monumentally worse. Everyone wanted the fame and glory of bringing down the big target.

  Hence the deconfliction meeting.

  Gary woke up the morning of his birthday, kissed his wife good-bye, and got into his Ford Explorer to begin the five-hour drive to DC, where he would present his findings so far on the case.

  As the road signs zipped by and the clouds in the sky darkened, Gary was somewhat giddy that he would be able to stand up in the meeting, in front of all of these big and important people, and explain that he had found a few people who might have been involved in the Silk Road from the beginning. It was unclear if any of them was the Dread Pirate Roberts, but he could lay out his cards and at least have a discussion about them. Among these clues, he would be able to talk about “Altoid,” the moniker that Gary had determined through a few subpoenas belonged to a man named Ross Ulbricht.

  • • •

  Chris Tarbell had decided he wouldn’t travel down to the deconfliction meeting the Department of Justice was setting up. He knew he was being a prima donna, but he also knew he “didn’t have time for that shit.”

  The FBI agents in the Pit didn’t have time for much these days. They were, after all, sifting through the biggest bounty anyone could ever hope for on this case: the Silk Road servers.

  “We’ll conference in from New York,” Tarbell told Serrin Turner, the assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York. “Plus, you’ll be there.” There wasn’t much of a discussion about it; Tarbell had made up his mind. But to ensure they didn’t piss off anyone at the DOJ, they decided to send down two other agents on the case.

  • • •

  The door to Jared’s hotel room clicked shut behind him as he wandered down the hall of the Hilton in downtown Washington, DC, walking toward the elevator. His mind was spinning, trying to figure out what he was going to say at the deconfliction meeting that had been organized by the DOJ.

  He had been warned by the agents on the Baltimore task force that he shouldn’t say anything at all. The reason for this, they told him, was that there were rumors floating around that the FBI would be in the meeting, and “everyone knows how shady those FBI fuckers can be.” If Jared stood up and named one of his own suspects in the investigation, and someone from the Bureau was indeed in the room, they could run off and use that name in their own probe. “They are the worst snakes in the world,” the Baltimore team warned him. “Don’t say anything in the meeting.”

  But Jared wasn’t so sure that was true; maybe the best way forward was to collaborate. Baltimore was no help at all, but there could be other agents out there whom he could pool resources with. His go-it-alone attitude had gotten hi
m far in the case, but he was starting to question if it could get him all the way.

  As Jared drove toward the secret facility in DC where the meeting would be held, he couldn’t figure out what to do. He didn’t know if he should tell everyone about his recent arrests, or about the other accounts he had taken over on the Silk Road, or about the more than 3,500 seizures that now took up every crevice in his office, piled from floor to ceiling.

  Fuck, he thought. What am I supposed to do?

  • • •

  The conference room was massive, with enough seating for more than thirty-five people. In one corner Gary sat, staring at the morass of people, most of whom he had never seen before. In another corner Jared inspected the screen on the wall, which displayed the faces of two men, both in another location, who were staring down at everyone. And from that screen Tarbell looked out at the sea of government employees who were now taking their seats.

  Wow, there are a lot of people in this meeting, Tarbell thought. Sure is a good use of government money.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” a man said as the room quieted down. “Let’s go around and introduce ourselves. I’ll start. I’m Luke Dembosky with the Department of Justice.” The room went quiet instantly, as if someone had pressed a mute button somewhere. Luke Dembosky was high, high, high up in the U.S. government. He was someone you didn’t interrupt or fuck with. Everyone knew that.

  The ground rules of the meeting, Dembosky explained, were that everyone needed to be open and honest about where they were in their investigation. Then the DOJ would decide who got to lead the case going forward.

  “Shall we begin?” Dembosky said, looking directly at the Baltimore investigators in the room.

  A woman from the Baltimore task force stood up, introduced herself, and began presenting the evidence the Marco Polo task force had gathered over the past year and a half. She read off a few bullet points that were mostly negligible about a couple of informants the team had arrested and then wrapped up almost as soon as she had begun.

  “What about the undercover account you have?” Luke Dembosky asked, referring to the undercover drug smuggler persona Nob, which Carl Force from the DEA (a man who was, curiously, not present at this meeting) had been managing for the past year and everyone at the DOJ was very aware of.

  “We can’t talk about that,” she replied. Then she said, “That’s 6E.”

  People in the room looked around in shock. Every member of government there knew that “6E” meant part of a current grand jury hearing, which was a way of keeping the investigation sealed. But it made no sense to pull 6E in a meeting with the DOJ.

  “The whole purpose of this meeting is to put your cards on the table,” Dembosky declared when he heard this.

  “It’s 6E,” the woman said again, nervous yet defiant. She didn’t want to talk about the case, not because she was protecting someone in that grand jury investigation but because she didn’t want the other people in the room to steal any of Baltimore’s work.

  In a matter of minutes a screaming match erupted, with the DOJ attorneys demanding information on the Baltimore investigation and the Baltimore task force petulantly reiterating “6E” over and over.

  Dembosky, losing his patience, said it was time to take a break.

  When everyone returned to the room, it was Jared’s turn to speak. He was anxious. While he had walked into the room that morning determined that he wouldn’t share much about his investigation, fearing the FBI would steal all the work he had done, Jared had just changed his mind. After that debacle he had just witnessed, with Luke Dembosky telling the Baltimore task force that their behavior was “completely improper,” Jared decided he was going to take a chance and tell the room everything.

  He stood up and spoke for more than forty minutes, explaining that he had seized almost 3,500 packages of drugs. He shared the techniques he had developed to spot this incoming mail and how he knew which drugs had been purchased from the Silk Road by matching package contents to photos and locations on the site. He talked about dealers he had arrested or questioned, including people from the Netherlands, and others from all over the United States. He described the vendor accounts he had taken over on the site, and he explained the inner workings of the Silk Road, with charts and illustrations showing who was whom. Finally he talked about a recent account he had commandeered that had belonged to a high-level employee on the Silk Road and showed how the account had allowed Jared to be a fly on the wall in the meetings DPR held with his underlings.

  Back in New York, in the middle of Jared’s presentation, Tarbell looked at the lead attorney sitting next to him and said, “I want to work with that guy.” The attorney nodded his head in complete agreement.

  By the end of Jared’s presentation, everyone was in awe at the work he had done. His choice to speak had worked to his benefit, and the Baltimore agents, by comparison, looked worse than they had forty minutes earlier.

  But the grand finale was about to begin.

  When it was the FBI’s turn to speak, Tarbell and his crew had decided that the assistant U.S. attorney from New York would explain the FBI’s investigation thus far. And yet, as he stood up in the conference room and began speaking, no one had any clue what they were about to hear.

  “We have the server,” Serrin Turner declared abruptly.

  The room fell silent. Not a single word was uttered. In New York Tarbell sat in the conference room looking at the screen with a giant shit-eating grin on his face.

  In a matter of seconds, as people realized what they had just heard, agents from all corners of the room began to speak, asking when they could get access to the server.

  “We don’t know what we have yet,” Serrin said. “Let us take a look at it first.” He noted that they had gotten their hands on the server only a couple of weeks earlier, and their computer scientists were still rebuilding it so they could search through its content.

  After a discussion about this major revelation, Luke Dembosky said the meeting would be coming to a close and he would be in touch with people individually to figure out how to move forward. Until then, he instructed all of the agents in the room to keep pushing forward with their individual cases.

  “Anyone have anything else?” Dembosky asked as he peered around the room.

  No one said anything. Including Gary Alford of the IRS.

  “Okay, thanks for coming, everyone,” Dembosky said. “We’ll be in touch about next steps.”

  • • •

  The rain started with small sprinkles on Gary’s car window. A few drops here, a few there. The wipers made them disappear. Then there were more. Hundreds, millions, maybe. The windshield wipers thrashed back and forth but did nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. All the cars on the freeway just stopped, unable to see a few feet in front of them, and Gary pulled his SUV over to the side of the road.

  Happy friggin’ birthday, Gary, he thought as he looked out the window and contemplated the deconfliction meeting he had just left. A meeting that had left him crestfallen.

  When he had been assigned to the Silk Road case, Gary had thought he was the star young agent the government was bringing in to help take down the online drug empire. And yet in the middle of the meeting with the DOJ, he had realized there were other stars too. An entire constellation of them. Sure, he knew about the task forces in Chicago and Baltimore, but no one had told him about the FBI. The same FBI that worked a few blocks away from his office. When Serrin Turner had stood up and said, “We have the server,” Gary had felt a punch to his gut. No one had told him that this wasn’t a collaboration but rather a competition.

  So why was Gary wasting all of his time reading the discussions on the site’s forums (each three times) and studying the language of the Dread Pirate Roberts (also three times) and spending his birthday—the one day of the year when Gary had made the city go dark!—driving down to a meeting
in Washington, DC?

  That’s it, Gary thought as the rain pounded against the window, I’m done. The FBI has the servers; they obviously know about all of the suspects in the case, and their names. What do they need me for?

  A few minutes later, as the skies turned blue and the rain washed away, Gary pulled his car back onto the road, heading north toward New York City. He decided that, going forward, he would focus on people who were laundering money on the site, as he had been assigned. What had he been thinking, anyway? That a number-crunching black man from the projects who worked in the least-respected ranks of criminal investigations in government, and who knew nothing about coding or drugs, could take down the most notorious criminal drug enterprise of our time? Fuck that! As he sped up the freeway Gary decided he was done looking for the Dread Pirate Roberts, even if he had already found him.

  Chapter 54

  JARED BECOMES CIRRUS

  When Jared Der-Yeghiayan was a freshman in high school, his math teacher would walk into class each day with a Rubik’s Cube in hand. Young Jared would watch as the teacher passed the colored square cube around the room, instructing every student to jumble it as much as possible. “If I can solve this Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, you all get homework,” the teacher said to the class each day. “If I can’t, you don’t get any homework.” Sure enough, every single class ended with students trudging home with a complicated math assignment.

  After witnessing this spectacle several times, Jared was plagued by a desire to figure out how his teacher could always solve the riddle of the cube. He ran out and picked up his own Rubik’s Cube and spent weeks trying to solve the puzzle. With a lot of tenacity and a smidgen of help from the teacher, he was finally able to do the same thing. Over the years, Jared had collected dozens of different Rubik’s Cubes, now scattered all over his home and office. They hung from key chains and fell unexpectedly out of backpacks. To this day Jared had never met a cube he couldn’t solve in less than a minute.