American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  Julia stared out the window as they waited for their breakfast to arrive. They seemed to be in a blue-collar neighborhood, a small enclave on the edge of the city with an Irish pub and lots of middle-class families. Yet among the people walking by, heading to work or a nearby coffee shop, Julia observed techies in hoodies and Google T-shirts; it seemed gentrification was afoot.

  “So what are we doing today?” she asked while taking a sip from the diner’s shitty burned coffee.

  “Well,” Ross said, “I have some work to do, so why don’t you go and wander around the stores and we can meet up later?”

  “That’s fine. I’ll do some shopping.”

  After breakfast Ross handed her a set of keys and walked in the direction of Monterey Boulevard, toward his apartment. Julia turned and walked the other way, toward the Mission District.

  Julia had planned to be out all morning, maybe picking up a few dresses or some sexy lingerie, but she wasn’t dressed for the San Francisco cold. Each time she left a store, a frigid wind engulfed her, pushing her back in the direction she had come. After an hour of this she’d had enough. She turned around, giving up on her shopping quest.

  It was late morning when she returned to the apartment, placing the key that Ross had given her into the lock, twisting it, and then slowly swinging the door open.

  She nonchalantly came up the stairs, rubbing her hands together to warm her skin as she turned and walked into Ross’s bedroom. When she entered, she saw him standing there, his back to her, his laptop open on his standing desk. And in a brief moment she saw something that took her back to their time together in Austin: a dozen black-and-white windows open on his computer, some with chat logs, others with code, and a Web site with a small green camel for a logo in the corner. In mere milliseconds she knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Hi,” she said from behind him.

  Startled, he quickly tapped a single button on his laptop that made the screen go dark and he turned around.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, flustered and nervous. “Just some work.”

  They stood in silence for a moment. But she knew. And he knew. Ross hadn’t given up the site as he had once said. He was still very much involved in the Silk Road. Julia knew then that she had two choices: stay and accept him for who he was or turn around and leave.

  Or perhaps there was a third way.

  Chapter 59

  I AM GOD

  How does this look?” Julia asked Ross as she twirled around in a floral yellow dress.

  “Hot—you always look hot.”

  She slipped on some sneakers and told him to hurry up. “We’re going to be late for church,” she said.

  “We’ll be fine,” he assured her.

  It was Sunday morning, and as they walked to the bus, Julia wondered if she should mention something to Ross about the Silk Road. She had assumed when she arrived in San Francisco that he was done with the site—that’s what he had told her time and again. But there had been so many clues in the few hours they had spent together. His skittishness, especially around his computer; the way he answered questions about work; and then catching him on the computer. Sure, he still lived like a pauper, renting a cheap room on the outskirts of the city with furniture he had bought on the street, and he still wore the same clothes he had worn in college. But that was Ross. His cheapness didn’t prove, or negate, anything.

  On the bus ride to church, Julia explained that the congregation where they were heading had a belief system that everyone can talk to God. Therefore, she said, there wasn’t one pastor reading the sermon; everyone took it in turns, each reading a passage for two minutes before the piano dinged and someone else stood up to take the pulpit. “It’s a little culty,” she joked, “but it’s really quite beautiful.”

  The church looked more like a 1980s office building that belonged to an obscure spy agency than a place of God. It was two stories high and painted a strange lime green color. Dozens of white security cameras pointed down from every direction. The only signifier that this was a place of worship was the dark lettering across the top that read MEETING PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN SAN FRANCISCO.

  Services had already begun when they rushed inside, Julia ushering Ross into a pew in the back of the room. As they settled into the wooden seats, prayers were being chanted by the mostly Asian parishioners. “Oh Lord!” and “Jesus, praise the Lord!” ricocheted through the large room. Almost immediately the congregation was asked to “please rise.”

  “We’re going to read from the Tree of Life,” the first parishioner said, beginning the passage in the Bible where Adam and Eve are deceived by a serpent.

  The story was one that everyone in the church had heard before, one Ross had been told as a child, as had Julia. In it God instructs Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden, for if they do, they will die. But a snake arrives with a different message.

  “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made,” the parishioner read aloud. “‘You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”

  There was a ding of the piano as the next parishioner took the pulpit.

  “O Lord!”

  “Hallelujah!”

  As the story continued—a story of good and evil—Julia realized she didn’t have to broach the uncomfortable subject of the Silk Road with Ross. She believed that what the sermon was saying in that very moment wasn’t for the dozens of churchgoers who praised the Lord already, or even for her; it was a message from God, who was speaking directly to Ross. She reached over and grabbed his hand as they listened to the rest of the tale, where God explains that there will be repercussions for Adam’s actions.

  “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” Another ding! rang through the room. “O Lord!”

  When the service ended, Ross and Julia walked outside and waited for the bus to arrive. “What did you think?” Julia asked him. “Did you enjoy any of the verses we read?”

  “Yes,” Ross said. “I get the morals. I can see how for some people it’s really important. I really get that, but for me, I just don’t need something like that.”

  “Well, how do you know what’s right and what’s wrong?” Julia asked.

  “I think about it,” Ross said, then paused for a moment. “I think about it myself.”

  In the distance Julia could see the bus approaching. She looked back at Ross and tried to press the question again. “But how do you know what’s good and what’s evil without a reference point? Jesus is my relationship that helps me decide if I’m doing good in my life.”

  “I think a man is his own God and can decide for himself what’s right and wrong,” Ross said. “As a man, I decide for myself.”

  Julia listened to him, realizing that Ross saw himself as a guiding light, and there was no room for another. In his eyes, he was his own God.

  When the bus arrived, they got on in silence. Julia was sad that he hadn’t accepted the verses, but she wanted to enjoy the day and what was left of the weekend, so she decided to change the tone, reaching for her camera as they began taking selfies together, capturing a moment in time that she would never forget. They decided to get off the bus at a nearby park and then walked toward the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a sign at the edge of a cliff that read DO NOT ENTER.

  “Come on,” Ross said to Julia as they scampered behind the barrier. She giggled with the excitement of it all. She handed him her camera and Ross looked through the viewfinder and began taking a rapid succession of photos. As his finger pressed the shutter, Julia slipped her yellow dress off her shoulders until it was in a crumpled pile on the grassy ledge. In a matter o
f seconds there was no dress at all, and then he dropped the camera on the floor and they had sex on the edge of the cliff.

  They went home that evening with a different feeling between them. All Julia had wanted to hear was that he was done with his former life and ready to be with her, but he clearly had a different plan. That night, as they lay in bed together, Julia tried one last time to change his mind.

  “Would you ever consider getting married?” Julia asked.

  Ross laughed. “We haven’t seen each other in a long time. It’s been over a year.”

  “So what? We were dating for a long time before that.”

  “No, I’m not ready,” he said. “I still have things I need to do.”

  She knew exactly what those things were, and she knew she couldn’t stop him from doing them. He would just keep eating, and eating, and eating.

  Usually Ross would cuddle Julia. But tonight Ross turned around and stared pensively at the wall, and this time Julia cuddled him, holding him tight while she silently cried.

  In the morning they woke up, she packed her things for the airport, and he helped her with her bags as they set off toward the train.

  They stood there where they had greeted each other at the beginning of the weekend, and Ross kissed her as the cold fog swept by.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  “Will you come to Austin and stay with me?”

  “Maybe next month,” he replied.

  They kissed again, and then they turned and walked in opposite directions, Julia scurrying toward the entrance to the train station. She started crying again as she looked back at Ross, who stood there for a moment, watching her. Eventually he smiled, slipped his hands in his pockets to shield them from the frigid air, then turned and began walking briskly up Diamond Street, back toward the Silk Road.

  Chapter 60

  THE PHONE CALL

  Gary sat silently in his cubicle, growing increasingly frustrated as he listened to the conversation going on around him. A conversation that took him back to that fateful morning exactly twelve years and one day earlier. The day the world changed.

  He had been a student at Baruch College at the time, and he had seen the first responders charging toward the towers. Later that morning, as he walked home to Brooklyn across the bridge, the World Trade Center had crumbled behind him, leaving 2,606 people dead.

  In the days after the attacks, as the reality of what had happened to New York City—to America—set in, Gary had started to learn some of the names and faces of those who perished. Each morning on his path to school he walked along Lexington Avenue past a building called the Armory, which was covered in flyers of the thousands of people who were now missing in the plume of dust. It quickly became clear that none of those people, whose pictures looked back at him helplessly, would ever go home to their loved ones.

  As was true for all New Yorkers, the stories people told of that day could feel palpable to Gary. But nothing was as real as the conversation taking place in front of him right now, over a decade later—on September 10, 2013—between the two men on the task force who were now sitting next to him in adjacent cubicles. These two men, it appeared, had run toward the towers that fateful day and then spent weeks digging through the dust and debris for survivors, mostly finding death.

  “You getting your medical tomorrow?” Gary overheard one of them, an NYPD detective, in the cubicle in front of him say to another from New York’s Clarkstown Police Department. As Gary listened, the two men talked briefly about their breathing issues and other ailments that still lingered twelve years later. They talked about other first responders they knew who had developed serious illnesses, some who had even died. As Gary overheard this, he grew increasingly irate as he thought about what terrorists had tried to do to America in 2001 and what he saw the Dread Pirate Roberts trying to do to America in 2013.

  Gary had read all of DPR’s writings (three times) and had seen the Dread Pirate Roberts proclaiming to his legion of followers that the government’s time was “coming to an end”; that the state was the “enemy”; that people should have utter disdain for federal authorities, including everyone who sat in the room with Gary at that moment. The same men and women who had run toward the World Trade Center on September 11 and who tomorrow would have to go to the hospital for health checkups for their heroic efforts.

  As these thoughts all piled up atop one another, Gary had had enough. He spun around in his chair, looked directly at another detective on the Silk Road task force, and with vexation in his voice proclaimed, “I think I’m right. You know? I think it’s him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s him. Ross Ulbricht,” Gary said.

  “You really think you’re going to find him from a Google search?” Gary’s coworker said.

  Gary had suspected that Ross Ulbricht might be in some way involved with the Silk Road and had mentioned it to his coworkers months earlier, but the lead had gone nowhere. They couldn’t pursue a case against someone based on the mere fact that they had posted about the Silk Road on the Internet. But after Gary had seen the IP address from a café in San Francisco on the wall at the FBI office, the city where this Ross Ulbricht character apparently lived, he had become convinced that he was at least involved, if not actually the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  “Yes!” Gary said, his hands animated, his voice growing louder. “I’m right. I’m telling you, I’m right.”

  After a few minutes laying out the facts again, Gary stood up and announced that he was going to go back through the case again, starting from the beginning. Just as he had read every e-mail, blog post, news article, and forum posting three times, Gary was going to go back through his investigation three times, from start to finish. Maybe, he reasoned, he had missed something.

  He wandered away from his cubicle and around the corner to a woman nearby who worked for the Department of Homeland Security. “I need you to run Ross Ulbricht’s name,” Gary told her as he sat down in an empty seat nearby, requesting the same background check he had done on Ross months earlier. Gary didn’t expect the woman would find anything new. He just wanted to see if some small detail had floated by unnoticed. A speck of DNA, a parking ticket, anything.

  After a minute the records loaded onto her screen. The woman first reviewed Ross’s travel record, noting that he had gone to Dominica, a data point that Gary knew about and that he thought was suspect, as criminals often hid money in the Caribbean. She kept going through Ross’s file and then she stopped suddenly. “You know there’s a hit on this guy?” the woman said.

  “What?” Gary asked, confused.

  “Yeah, there’s a hit on this guy from a few weeks ago.”

  Gary was in shock as he heard the word “hit.” He was simply trying to dot his i’s and cross his t’s three times over.

  “You want me to read it?” the woman asked.

  “Yes!”

  She read aloud, explaining that Customs and Border Protection had “seized counterfeit identity documents” and a Dylan Critten from DHS had visited Ross Ulbricht at his house on Fifteenth Avenue in San Francisco. The file she read from noted that Ross’s roommates had said his name was Josh, not Ross, and that Josh paid for his room in cash. She paused, looking over at Gary for a moment, and said, “You want me to keep reading? Is this helpful?”

  Gary’s brow furrowed. What he was hearing was surreal. “Yes!” he blurted out. “Keep reading! Keep reading!”

  She turned back to her computer and continued. In addition to the Fifteenth Avenue address, it appeared that Ross had lived on Hickory Street in the center of San Francisco. And then she began reading the report Dylan had written, verbatim. “Ulbricht generally refused to answer any questions pertaining to the purchase of this or other counterfeit identity documents,” she read. And then, like some sort of practical joke, s
he read the following sentence: “However‚ Ulbricht volunteered that hypothetically anyone could go onto a Web site named ‘Silk Road’ on ‘Tor’ and purchase any drugs or IDs.”

  Gary’s heart began thudding in his ears. It didn’t add up. This was all too much for it to be a coincidence. Gary immediately charged toward his supervisor’s office and burst into the room, adrenaline coursing through his veins.

  “It’s him!” Gary bellowed. “It’s him!”

  The supervisor told him to calm down and then listened to Gary make the case for why it was Ross Ulbricht—a case that was now more convincing than before, yet the supervisor cautioned that there were still many details that didn’t make sense. Still, Gary was told to take a deep breath and to call the U.S. Attorney’s Office to explain.

  • • •

  When Serrin Turner answered the phone, he didn’t expect to hear an agitated IRS agent on the other end of the line. “Slow down,” he said as Gary jumped right into his tirade. “Which guy are you talking about?”

  “The guy who I think has been running the site,” Gary said.

  “What about him?”

  Gary began a convoluted speech, laying out everything from the Google search results to the travel to Dominica—all of which he’d mentioned to Serrin a few weeks earlier while Gary had gone through a list of other potential suspects, but this time he added the details from the DHS report, noting the story of the fake IDs, the phony name “Josh,” and the mention of the Silk Road Web site.

  Serrin wasn’t sold by the evidence Gary had just delivered, but he was intrigued. “And this guy lives in San Francisco?” Serrin asked. “What’s his address?”

  As Gary read the address from the DHS report, Serrin began typing it into Google Maps. The map on his screen zoomed across the United States into the jagged protrusion of San Francisco, then down to Hickory Street, which sat almost in the middle of the seven-mile-square city. As Gary spoke in the background, Serrin clicked on the address on the map and then entered the only other piece of evidence that tied the Silk Road Web site to a person or place: Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street in San Francisco.