American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  The FBI mobilized immediately. A central command in Washington, which specialized in protecting agents who were under threat, was deployed. The NYPD was notified, with squad cars en route to Tarbell’s house, the kids’ school, and the home of his in-laws. With sirens blaring, Tarbell and his family were whisked off to a hotel in New Jersey, where they would spend the long weekend hiding out.

  Days later, when the FBI and NYPD said it was safe for the family to return home, they drove back the way they had come and into a house that was now being monitored via live video feeds and round-the-clock federal surveillance teams. That evening, after the kids had been tucked into bed and kissed good night, Tarbell and Sabrina sat across from each other at the kitchen table. They both had handguns next to them in case someone tried to enter the home. As they ate dinner, they looked like two people at war.

  Something had changed over that weekend. Sabrina’s mothering instincts had been awakened by the risks that had brushed up against her children, and as she looked at her husband, she spoke about the perils lovingly and yet resolutely. “I’ve given you sixteen years of this life,” she said, “but maybe now it’s time for you to do something for your family.”

  He knew exactly what she was asking for. His whole life, all Chris Tarbell had ever wanted to be was a cop. He didn’t care if he was handing out tickets to jaywalkers or hunting down the most wanted man on the Internet; it was his reason for being here. But at the same time he had always wanted a family too. And between the FBI and Sabrina and the kids, it wasn’t even a question of which one he was going to choose.

  Tarbell handed in his gun and his badge; the Eliot Ness of cyberspace resigned from the FBI.

  Tarbell now works for a major cyberconsultancy in New York City, where he assists companies and the government in computer-related crimes. He still plays the “would you rather” game. Even though his wife, Sabrina, now feels much safer, she still carries a handgun with her throughout the house, even resting one atop her fresh towels in the hamper while she does the laundry.

  • • •

  In the months after the Dread Pirate Roberts was captured, it appeared to Carl Force and Shaun Bridges that they had gotten away with fake murder and with stealing millions of dollars in Bitcoins. They had cleverly hidden most of their loot in offshore accounts under fake business names. They both assumed that those digital coins could never be traced back to them. After all, in their minds, Bitcoins were like cash—completely anonymous.

  Carl was so confident that he tried to contact book publishers in New York City and movie studios in Hollywood with the hope that he could sell his story as the undercover DEA agent who helped bring down the Silk Road. He was lionized as a hero at the DEA and even given awards for a job so well done. When it seemed that no one suspected Carl of anything unlawful, he quietly began selling some of his Bitcoins, paying off the mortgage on the old Colonial home and picking up a few toys.

  But when the FBI and IRS started to trace the Bitcoins that had flowed in and out of the Silk Road, by putting together a complex algorithm that figured out where the money took off and where it landed, it became apparent that some of these coins didn’t add up. While most of the money had been accounted for, with tens of millions of dollars pointing to Ross’s laptop and millions more directed to employees, hackers, and informants, there was also a slew of Bitcoins that curiously found their way back to Carl Force and Shaun Bridges. Maybe, the Feds thought, it was an anomaly. Two cops on the same task force would never steal money from a case.

  Or would they?

  As the Feds covertly began investigating this possibility, more peculiarities started to appear, all of which led back to Shaun and Carl.

  In one instance the FBI had found a message on the Silk Road servers that had been sent to the Dread Pirate Roberts from one of his alleged informants who was a mole inside the government. The plant went by the name “French Maid” and had been selling secrets to DPR for a hefty fee. But as the FBI started to look further, they noticed that one of the messages sent from French Maid to DPR was bizarrely signed “Carl.” And then another message sent shortly afterward provided a clarification: “I am sorry about that. My name is Carla Sophia and I have many boyfriends and girlfriends on the market place.”

  It was evident that Carl had fucked up and accidentally written his own name when selling information to DPR as someone else. The Feds later learned that Carl had created several other fake accounts that were used to threaten, coerce, or bribe the Dread Pirate Roberts. As all the loose ends were tied back together, they found dozens of clues that linked Carl to $757,000 in stolen Bitcoins.

  Faced with an endless list of evidence and the possibility of spending decades in a maximum-security prison, Carl Force surrendered to authorities and pled guilty to charges of theft of government property, wire fraud, money laundering, and conflict of interest. He was sentenced to seventy-eight months in federal prison.

  Shaun Bridges wasn’t prepared to go as quietly. When he discovered that the government was investigating him for money laundering and obstruction of justice, Shaun tried to have his work laptop, which contained a trove of evidence against him, erased. He then attempted (unsuccessfully) to change his name and Social Security number. When none of those tactics worked, he pled guilty to charges related to the $820,000 he had taken from the Silk Road and was given seventy-one months in prison and told to pay $500,000 in restitution. Unlike Carl, who turned himself in and began his sentence, Shaun was caught trying to leave the country with a computer, a bulletproof vest, passports, and a cell phone. The two men are now serving out their sentences in a federal penitentiary. They will both be released in 2022.

  • • •

  After Ross was arrested, Julia saw him a couple of times, venturing to New York to visit him in prison. They spoke on the phone every few weeks. Sometimes she cried when they talked; she always spoke of God. And then, one day in mid-2015, she stopped answering his phone calls. While she still loved Ross, she decided that it was time to focus on herself and her business. A year later Vivian’s Muse was one of the most successful boudoir photography studios in the country. Julia still hoped to find a good man to marry, one who would give her a child or two and a house with a white picket fence where she could live happily ever after.

  • • •

  Curtis Green (the Gooch) could have faced up to forty years in prison for being arrested with a kilo of cocaine in Spanish Fork, Utah. Instead, because he was tortured and fake-murdered by two government agents (Carl and Shaun) who had broken the law themselves, a federal judge in Baltimore let Curtis off with “time served.”

  After his trial Green began selling Silk Road memorabilia online, including Silk Road hats, Silk Road T-shirts, and signed copies of his memoir—which he is still writing—detailing his life as a Silk Road employee.

  • • •

  Gary Alford still works for the Internal Revenue Service in New York City, focusing on finance-related crimes. He was given an award by the government for his work on the Silk Road case. The gold placard, which sits on his desk at work, credits Gary with being “The Sherlock Holmes of Cyberspace.” He still reads everything three times.

  • • •

  For over a year after the Silk Road was shut down, Jared stayed undercover as Cirrus on the Dark Web and helped Tarbell, Gary, and others in law enforcement coordinate the arrest of the Dread Pirate Roberts’s most trusted advisers.

  Inigo, the youngest administrator at twenty-four years old, was arrested on a houseboat in Charles City, Virginia, where he lived and worked on the site. His elderly parents put up their home and retirement savings to post the $1 million bail to free their son. Smedley was apprehended by authorities entering the United States after trying to hide out in Thailand with Variety Jones. And SameSameButDifferent was captured in Australia by federal police in the outback. When he was apprehended, authorities found an engagement ring
in his pocket; he was on his way to propose to his girlfriend. One of the oldest administrators at forty, he had a full-time job helping people with intellectual and physical disabilities, in addition to working on the Silk Road.

  In all, several hundred people from forty-three different countries around the globe were caught buying, selling, and working on the Silk Road and were subsequently arrested by authorities, concluding with the capture of Variety Jones.

  The day after VJ was apprehended, Jared showed up at the mail center at Chicago O’Hare International Airport to explore the evidence locker and see the packages and drugs that had been seized the night before. Backpack slung over his shoulder, a Rubik’s Cube inside, he lumbered along the long hallway to the evidence room. He was excited to know that the case he had started working on years earlier, a case that had begun with a single peculiar pink pill coming into the same facility he now walked through, had finally and resolutely come to a close.

  Yet as Jared rounded the corner, passing by a doorway, he heard someone yell his name. “Jared! I got something for you.”

  “What is it?” Jared asked as he stopped and turned to walk toward a customs agent who sat in a nearby cubicle.

  “We found these in the mail last night,” the agent said, pointing down at a puffy brown envelope on his desk and a large pile of blue ecstasy pills that had been discovered in the package.

  “How many are in there?” Jared asked.

  “I counted two hundred,” the agent replied.

  “Two hundred?!”

  “Two hundred.”

  Ross Ulbricht.

  IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP

  Young Ross in elementary school in Austin, Texas (top left).

  IMAGE FROM ULBRICHT’S FACEBOOK PAGE

  Ross the Eagle Scout.

  IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP

  Ross with his parents, Lyn and Kirk Ulbricht, on graduation day.

  IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP

  Senior prom, where Ross ended the evening fully clothed in a swimming pool.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF DEBORAH HORWITZ

  The NOMMO Club at Penn State University, where Ross practiced his djembe drumming.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF JULIA VIE

  Ross Ulbricht and Julia Vie about to go on a date.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF JULIA VIE

  The Silk Road Web site, which offered more than 6,625 different listings for drugs.

  Gary Alford of the Internal Revenue Service.

  PHOTO BY COLE WILSON

  Jared Der-Yeghiayan of the Department of Homeland Security.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF JARED DER-YEGHIAYAN

  Carl Force of the Drug Enforcement Agency, sitting at his desk in Baltimore, Maryland.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF EPIC MAGAZINE

  Force disguised as Nob, his online alter ego on the Silk Road.

  USED AS EVIDENCE BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

  This image of Roger Thomas Clark, who is believed to be Variety Jones, was discovered on Ulbricht’s laptop among other photos of Silk Road employees.

  IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP

  Chris Tarbell of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF THE TARBELL FAMILY

  A section of the detailed diary found on Ross Ulbricht’s computer in which he describes commissioning a “hit” on someone who was trying to blackmail the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP

  Curtis Green, known on the Silk Road as ChronicPain, with his dog in Spanish Fork, Utah.

  IMAGE COURTESY OF EPIC MAGAZINE

  Curtis Green being fake-tortured in the Marriott Hotel by the Marco Polo task force.

  USED AS EVIDENCE BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

  Curtis Green’s staged murder, an image later sent to the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  USED AS EVIDENCE BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

  The photo Ross used to obtain fake IDs from a vendor on the Silk Road.

  IMAGE RECOVERED FROM ULBRICHT’S LAPTOP

  Notes on Reporting

  Each and every day, as we navigate the real world, we leave a billion little fingerprints in our wake. The door handles we touch, the screens we press, and the people we interact with all capture a trace of our being there. The same is true on the Internet. We share pictures and videos on social networks, leave comments on news articles. We e-mail, text, and chat with hundreds of people throughout the day.

  If there is anyone who left more of those digital fingerprints lying around the Internet than most people, it was Ross Ulbricht. He spent years living on his computer and interacting with people, good and bad, through that machine.

  Over the course of my research for this book, I was able to gain access to more than two million words of chat logs and messages between the Dread Pirate Roberts and dozens of his employees. These logs were excruciatingly in-depth conversations about every moment and every decision that went into creating and managing the Silk Road. They showed startling details about decisions to sell drugs, guns, body organs, and poisons and showed how every aspect of the site was managed. I also gained access to dozens of pages of Ross’s personal diary entries and thousands of photos and videos of Ross, both from his friends and from his own computer and cell phone.

  Working with a researcher, Nicole Blank, I scoured the Web for anything Ross had touched over the past decade, which resulted in an endless trove of social media content from Twitter, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, as well as articles and social content he had interacted with and commented on. The photos that I obtained of Ross, through friends and others, told more of a story than just the pictures; the background data of the images (known as EXIF data) showed when they were captured and in many instances, with GPS data, where they were taken.

  Then there was the three weeks of testimony and the hundreds of pieces of evidence that the prosecution and defense presented during Ross’s trial.

  Using an Excel database, my researcher and I were able to put all of this information into one place and cross-reference every moment from 2006 to 2013—in many instances down to the second. And with that, everything matched up neatly. For example, when the Dread Pirate Roberts talked to his lieutenants on the Silk Road about taking a weekend off for a short trip, on that same weekend Ross Ulbricht and his friends posted pictures of him camping. When Ross booked flights to Dominica, the Dread Pirate Roberts was unavailable at the exact moment the flight took off and returned online, in a different time zone, when Ross landed. These overlaps showed up hundreds of times in our database.

  In as many instances as I could, I visited the exact places Ross worked, sitting in the same chair in the Glen Park library, eating at the same sushi restaurant, and lying on the same patch of grass where he snapped a photo in Alamo Square. I spoke to hundreds of people from all stages of his life, from elementary school to college; prom dates and best friends; ex-lovers and one-night stands. Through a translator in Thailand, I was able to gain more information about the man alleged to be Variety Jones.

  For the law enforcement side of the story, I spent more than 250 hours with the federal agents who were involved in the hunt for the Dread Pirate Roberts, including the FBI, HSI, IRS, CBP, and DOJ. I visited their bureaus and offices, the airports they work out of, and the mail facilities where drugs were discovered. (I even met one of the drug-sniffing dogs, though he didn’t have much to say.) In addition, Joshua Bearman and Joshua Davis, who spent an additional fifty hours with the DEA and dozens of hours with one of the site’s employees for a feature in Wired on the Silk Road, contributed reporting to this book.

  For the most minute details I used online weather almanacs to determine the temperature and wind on particular days, surf reports to understand the height of the waves, flight details to learn if there was turbulence on a plane, and old Crai
gslist ads, phone records, travel logs, and several other digital tools to tell this story as a narrative nonfiction tale.

  From the day of Ross’s arrest I was able to gain access to security camera footage of the front of the Glen Park library. Footage that captures Ross’s last moments as a free man.

  While so many people spoke to me for the book, through his family and lawyers, Ross Ulbricht declined to be interviewed.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to start with a giant thanks to you, the reader, for taking the time to read this book. Seriously, thank you.

  I also want to acknowledge Ross’s parents, Lyn and Kirk. While they didn’t speak to me for this book, I did talk with them a number of times during Ross’s trial, and I felt incredibly sad for what they had been through.

  The following names might mean nothing to most people reading this story, but I can assure you that without them, this book wouldn’t exist.

  Thank you to my editor, Niki Papadopoulos, for being the greatest book editor who has ever roamed the halls of publishing (and thanks for having a last name that I still need to Google to ensure I’m spelling it correctly). Also, a giant thank-you to the entire team at Portfolio / Penguin, including Adrian, Will, Leah, Vivian, Stefanie, Tara, Bruce, and Hilary.

  Thanks to my book agents, Katinka Matson and the rest of the amazing team at Brockman, Inc.; to Brian Siberell and Bryan Lourd at CAA; and to Eric Sherman at Ziffren Brittenham. You’re all truly amazing and I feel so lucky to work with you all.