A question had been plaguing Chris Tarbell all day—in the office, at lunch, and now as he walked through downtown Manhattan with his coworkers. As the group crossed Broadway and turned right onto Center Street, he just couldn’t stop himself; he had to ask. “Okay,” he said to the men around him, “if you had to . . .” But before he could finish, they all began wincing, knowing full well what was coming. A “would you rather” joke from Tarbell was usually a distasteful, often comical query that always landed at a moment his colleagues least expected, intentionally catching them completely off guard. These often-crass jokes could range from the truly unpalatable to the truly bizarre. “Would you rather: sleep with your mother, or sleep with your father?” “Would you rather: be half your height, or double your weight?” “Would you rather have an erection for a year or hiccups for the rest of your life?”
“Where do you come up with this shit, Tarbell?” one of his coworkers asked.
“Come on. If you had to—like, you had no choice,” Tarbell continued, as they kept walking, his colleagues grimacing as Tarbell harangued them with questions like an older brother tormenting his younger siblings.
The badgering briefly stopped when the group came upon the Whiskey Tavern, a local dive bar on Baxter Street, sandwiched between two bail-bond storefronts that looked out on the New York Police Department.
All the cops and government employees in New York had local watering holes they burrowed into after work. The FDNY went to Social Bar on Eighth Avenue, the NYPD had Plug Uglies on Third, and the Cyber Division of the FBI’s New York office lived at the Whiskey Tavern. Special Agent Chris Tarbell of the FBI and his team of agents frequented the shit-hole dive bar at least five nights a week.
When they arrived, Meg, the freckled bartender, would greet them with a “Hello, boys,” then let them know, “The back room is all yours.” The area of the bar she was referring to was always reserved for the FBI cybercrime crew, and if they arrived unannounced, Meg would evict whoever was there.
Given that tonight was a special evening, Tarbell asked for a few bottles of champagne, pronounced “cham-pag-nay.” (By “champagne” he meant Miller High Life—the so-called champagne of beers, which cost $4 a pint at the tavern.)
Most of the FBI agents at the bar dressed the same, wearing oversize dark suits and white button-down shirts, and could have easily passed for bankers or lawyers. That was not true of Chris Tarbell, who looked like a cop from ten city blocks away with his short buzz cut, young face that didn’t seem to fit his stocky 250-pound body, and swagger that exuded confidence.
As they settled in for a night of revelry, it was Tarbell who was the star of the show. After all, he was the one responsible for recently taking down an infamous hacker group, called LulzSec, that the media and security experts had asserted could never be stopped. What made LulzSec so special was that, unlike hackers of the past who would break into an institution for financial gain, this nefarious crew had spent the past year ransacking the Internet for the “lulz,” a neologism that essentially meant “a good laugh.” Part of their comedic hacking had included knocking the CIA Web site off-line, breaking into Sony Pictures servers, and defacing the Web sites of the British newspapers the Times and the Sun by posting a fake news story that Rupert Murdoch had died. All just for fun.
But after months of undercover work, Chris Tarbell and his FBI team had systematically arrested the people behind LulzSec all across the world—in Chicago, Ireland, and New York City. Which is why the gang was celebrating at the Whiskey Tavern.
In the back of the bar, Meg reappeared with a dirty black tray crowded with twenty shot glasses, half of them filled with cheap whiskey, the other half with green pickle juice. She dropped the concoction, known as the Pickle Back, a bar specialty, on the table.
“Whose turn is it to drink the tray?” Tarbell bellowed to the group of men around him, all of whom responded with another wince.
Years earlier Tarbell had invented this ritual—known as the “drinking of the tray”—wherein someone was expected to drink the slushy potion of pickle juice, whiskey, and any other liquid that had been sloshing on the tray before the drinks were served. If no one else had the guts to do it, Tarbell was always up for the sickening challenge.
At thirty-one years old, Tarbell had already made a big name for himself as one of the top cybercrime agents in the FBI, if not the world. Sure, he’d landed the LulzSec case by chance when a tip came in through a hotline and Tarbell was the lucky one to pick up the phone. But it was what he did with that information that separated him from the other agents—turning the top hacker of LulzSec, a man who was known as Sabu, and then using him to bring down the entire organization. Because of Tarbell’s ability to find people online, the media would soon bestow on him the nickname “the Eliot Ness of cyberspace,” after the renowned American Prohibition agent.
It was no accident that Tarbell had ended up where he was, rising through the ranks of the FBI. He had planned it this way, just as he planned everything. Tarbell had worked hard to earn his master’s degree in computer science, then became a cop. After more than a decade of eighteen-hour days, he had made his way up through the FBI to become a special agent. And he didn’t stop there. When he wasn’t with his wife and kids, he continued to study computer forensics for any technology platform imaginable.
He endured this because, more than anything, he desired to be the absolute best at anything he put his mind to. If his gym buddy was able to bench-press 400 pounds, Tarbell would spend months of his life lifting weights until he could bench-press 450 pounds (which he could actually do).
Over time he learned that the way to have a leg up on everyone else was to anticipate something before it happened and then have the answer to it. He prepped for everything. The night before he took his SATs in high school he did a practice drive to the test site to ensure he arrived on time. He did this the day before his physical test for the FBI. During his first few weeks at the Bureau he created a meticulous map of the entire office, labeling who everyone was and what he needed to know about them.
This obsessive planning came home with him. He told his wife, Sabrina, that the couple needed a code word they could use in case anything ever went wrong. “‘Quicksand,’” he told her. “That’s the word we use with each other if we’re ever in trouble: ‘quicksand.’” And when the cybercrime boys went out drinking, Tarbell texted ahead to let freckled Meg know how many people to expect. Nothing like planning a party at a dive bar.
On this particular night as many as fifty government employees were at the Whiskey Tavern to celebrate the capture of the LulzSec crew. As Tarbell sat there licking the taste of pickles and whiskey off his lips, Tom Brown, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. who would end up prosecuting the LulzSec hackers, wandered over.
“So, Tarbell,” Tom said, preparing to ask a question that had been plaguing him all day. “What’s next? Who are we going after next?”
Tarbell looked back, annoyed. He had just spent the past few months of his life working twenty-hour days trying to take down LulzSec, and Tom was already badgering him about the next target. “Come on,” Tarbell said. “We just fucking finished a case. Can’t we just celebrate first?”
“Of course you can,” Tom replied glacially, taking a short sip from his drink, “but I just wanted to see what we were going to do after that.”
Tom was clearly baiting Tarbell and already knew the answer. “There is a target no one has been able to crack,” Tom said, explaining that “no one” included the DEA, HSI, and a handful of government agencies from around the globe. The cybercrime FBI agents sipped from their cham-pag-nay as they listened to what Tom was saying. “I think,” he said, “we should start looking at the Silk Road next.”