It was dark and quiet in Glasgow, Scotland, as the clock in the hotel room wound past 2:00 a.m. and a middle-aged man, sitting at his computer, sipped some water to quench his thirst.
The man known as Variety Jones was balding and disheveled, his T-shirt stained and stretched at the neck, his eyes worn and droopy like a plastic figurine left too near a fire. This was a man who had been through hell and back, his body ravaged by years of disease, drugs, and jail, but he had clearly enjoyed the trip.
On his computer screen a number of windows sat splayed open. One had some sort of programming code and another appeared to be a chat window with two people talking.
The man with the droopy eyes clicked on the chat box and then began typing.
“Tappity tap tap,” he wrote to DPR, then pressed the “return” key.
A moment later there was a reply: “Taparoo.”
“I’m in the land of 12 Euro tins of beer in a mini fridge,” Jones wrote. “Oh joy!”
“Hello hotel bill.”
VJ had been lying low in London with his girlfriend for the past few months while he worked on the Silk Road for his unofficial boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts. Mostly their relationship had gone swimmingly. Their skill sets were complementary, and they largely shared the same worldview. But a fissure had begun to surface. After Jones had come to Glasgow to celebrate his uncle’s death—yes, celebrate: as VJ told DPR, the “Jones” clan “threw bigger funerals than weddings,” with the casket in the middle of a pub and a revelry of dancing and drinking, made up of four hundred friends and family, flowing around the deceased uncle—he had logged on to check in with DPR and resolve a moral disagreement they were having.
It wasn’t often that they argued. The relationship between Jones and Dread was impenetrable, and a true and tight friendship had developed between the two men since a year earlier, when they first met through the Silk Road. Their alliance had blossomed over their shared belief that drugs should be legal, and guns too. VJ was a loyal servant and companion. He had even talked about buying a helicopter company to break DPR out of jail if he was ever caught. “Remember that one day when you’re in the exercise yard, I’ll be the dude in the helicopter coming in low and fast, I promise,” he had written to Dread. “With the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come get you.”
But even with that bond, fundamental disagreements over the direction of the site would crop up, and Variety Jones was trying desperately to steer DPR in a new direction on a particular topic.
It wasn’t even up for debate in VJ’s mind that the Dread Pirate Roberts was as libertarian as they came and that he believed the Silk Road should be a place to buy and sell anything. There were no rules and no regulations, and as a result there was something illegal for sale on the site for literally every letter of the alphabet. Acid, benzos, coke, DMT, ecstasy, fizzies, GHB . . . but it was the letter H that had Variety Jones in a very difficult quandary. He was fine with everything before and after that letter, but heroin—he hated it.
“I don’t even have a problem with coke,” VJ wrote to DPR, but “H, man—in prison I’ve seen guys—I wish that shit would go away.”
Variety Jones was open about the time he had spent in jail. He told long and funny stories about people he had met behind bars and explained the ins and outs of getting around the system, including how cans of “mackerel” were the currency of choice in the British prison he had been confined to years earlier. “I treat [prison] like being in a 3rd world country with poor communications infrastructure,” he joked.
But he told Dread about his time in jail not for amusement but as a prelude to sharing a story about what he had seen heroin do to people in prison: In lockup they drug-tested you randomly, but they performed these exams only during the week, on Monday through Friday. Everyone inside knew how long each drug lasts in your system. If a prisoner smoked some weed, for example, it would show up in his piss for up to a month. As a result, no one ever smoked weed behind bars. But heroin only sticks around in your bloodstream for two days, tops. Which meant that if you injected H on a Friday, it was out of your system by Monday morning, just in time for the drug tests to begin.
“On Fridays,” VJ wrote, “folks would go wild on H.” And in the maximum-security wing where he was housed, H days had been nicknamed Hell Days, because that’s exactly what they were like. “Guys would jam a week’s worth of H in 4 hours.” The wails from the inmates who were under were followed by moans as they came to and then a week of vomiting and tweaking as they spun out, unable to sleep, jerking and tugging and twisting in their beds as they waited for the following Friday to arrive, when they could ease the pain from the Friday before, and the cycle would begin anew.
“It wasn’t pretty in there then,” VJ said. “They just wanted to sleep.”
Now, long out of jail and the deputy of the biggest drug site the world had ever seen, VJ found himself in a moral predicament.
DPR had been talking to the South American smuggler, Nob, about transporting massive amounts of heroin through the United Kingdom and selling it in bulk on the Masters of the Silk Road site. But before they could even begin building such a site or taking money from Nob, DPR wanted to ensure this Nob character was legit. So he had asked VJ, his consigliere, to help facilitate an early test deal.
Morally, though, Jones told Dread, “I don’t think I could make money off importing H. If you want to, I’ll offer all the help and advice you need, but I don’t want to profit off of it.”
Ross had never seen the effects of heroin in person, as he noted to VJ that the experience of Hell Days “sounds awful.” But it still didn’t deter him from his belief system. As Ross had argued back at Penn State, it wasn’t his place to say who could put what into their body. “I’ve got this separation between personal and business morality,” DPR explained to VJ. “I would be there for a friend to help him break a drug dependency, and encourage him to not start, but I would never physically bar him from it if he didn’t ask me to.”
Variety Jones contemplated how hard he should press the issue. He had been doing his best to counsel the Dread Pirate Roberts, but sometimes DPR’s ego got in the way. On more than one occasion VJ had lost his patience. “You should be acting like Steve Jobs, not Larry the Cable Guy,” he had written to DPR about a previous debate. “Leaders lead, they don’t throw out things willy nilly, and wait to see who follows what.”
Often Dread would try to defend his ideas, but there was no grappling with Variety Jones; a maestro on the keyboard, he was a master debater, a true contender who could have stood up to Ross on any topic—and often did.
The conversation about H dragged on for a while, but there was no sign that DPR was ever going to relent. So, while sitting in that dark Glasgow hotel room, VJ ultimately decided to let DPR win the discussion about heroin.
There were two reasons, though. The first harkened back to the last time he had let a disagreement like this cause a rift between him and a business partner, years earlier when VJ co-ran a Web forum that sold weed seeds online. That dispute had destroyed that enterprise and, according to Jones, had ended in a shoot-out in Texas.
But more important, Variety Jones decided to let the issue go because he had much bigger plans for his involvement in the Silk Road. While the Dread Pirate Roberts didn’t know this yet, VJ didn’t want to just be an employee; he wanted to be co-captain of the ship.